Graphical artifacts everywhere, again...

[Breakerchase]

I was running those NGO modified Catalyst 7.3 (I think) Drivers when this first happened. Then I switched to using Omegas and eventually vanilla ATI ones. The heatsink of my 9800 Pro is warm to the touch, but not burning hot enough for artifacts to appear, usually. Every 3D game I have played gives me artifacts. Solutions anyone?

[Incinerate_IV]

Your heatsink could be not getting enough contact with the heatsink, see if it's properly secured. You might have to put some new thermal compound on it, since the stock thermal pads are probably dried up by now.

A 9800 Pro is pretty old, it could be that the graphics card is just reaching the end of its lifespan.

[Freddie]

I was running those NGO modified Catalyst 7.3 (I think) Drivers when this first happened. Then I switched to using Omegas and eventually vanilla ATI ones. The heatsink of my 9800 Pro is warm to the touch, but not burning hot enough for artifacts to appear, usually. Every 3D game I have played gives me artifacts. Solutions anyone?

I've been using 3D graphics since the 3DFX voodoo 1 came out, since then I've had a Geforce Ti200, an 5600FX, Radeon 9600 Pro, an 6800 GT, a 6600 GT and a X1900 XT which I'm using at the moment. Most of them have gone wrong (started to produce artefacts) at some point for one reason or another, even on the ones I’ve fitted after market coolers onto.

Please remember your video card has a hard life, even a harder life you’re your cpu, so it stands to reason they will start to break down. Given your card is about 4 years old, and it’s only recently started to go wrong you can consider yourself lucky to have a card that’s had such a good innings.

You could try fitting an third party heatsink and fan which might improve matters but frankly I think you would be throwing money away that could be used to buy a new video card.

[Hadrian]

Yep, I agree. Seeing that you've tried all the different drivers available and it's artifacting on all your games, (that's a particularly bad sign) I'd have to agree that it's probably dying, as well as the fact that today's games are far more exacting on your old workhorse of a VC than the ones when it was first marketed, so it's having to work harder in it's latter years than ever, thus more strain on it and....