Hello so my ATI card is broken, I'm attaching a photo of F8 selection screen, maybe some of you had this problem, or there's hardware technician on this forum. Tried reheating(with hot air soldering station). UPDATE: checked with DOS VGA testing utility, whole ram is huge amount of errors(GPU won't se RAM). tried to flash BIOS using windows utility, it won't see the card, device manager sees how it should, but vga works only in 8bit 800x600 in windows enviroment, if I load ATI drivers and try to change resolution it gives ATI dll error(BSOD).
after seeing that screen i think your graphics ram is fried and you need to consider buying a new card if this was only in windows it could be a driver fault, but seeing this sort of thing at boot means, like i said, that your GRam is fried. i think it's safe to say that your graphics board went up to pixelheaven
Thanks for reply, there are 8 memory chips and you say that they all died? quite strange coinsidence.... there is DC/DC converters controller chip, if I press it, screen goes off, if I press GPU I get less noise on the screen. problem more seems to be GPU->VRAM control. when I will have more free time I will check VRAM for power pulstations with esciloscope... and all DC/DC converters output. nice joke about pixelheaven, I have 7 IBM T4X mobos and nvidia 8400GS with dead GPUs, and they all for sure have reached "pixelheaven", but HD3850 seems interesting to me... have you heard about frankestein?
hmm,. the 8800's series could be baked/reflowed to be revived once more, i do not think it is possible with the 3850 it would indeed be a big coinsidence if ALL ram chips died, usually it's just one or two you could try to make some sort of custom insulated clamp to put pressure on the desired area's to test your theory, maybe a reballing is in order, or rather(that is, if your hunch is right), replacing GPU/VRAM control,provided you can find the right parts for that.
already tried to reflow, used high tempreture, and air flow, 400C,22L/min(used some polish flux for BGA), without luck. reball should help, but soldering iron is overheated, not chip itself. So its almost impossible to remove VRAM/GPU without damaging PCB. Still havent checked DC/DC converters.