Wow!! Was the 9800 destroyed?? What happened??

I bought a 9800 PRO 128, which is what your pictures look like to me. The first system I installed it in had a 300W power supply, and the card (9800) crowbarred it!! (Shut it down.) I was running a Radeon VE board in it previously - granted probably not 1/4 of the power draw.

I ended up buying a 450W supply in order to run this board in that system. But, I've never seen a Video Card (or a HD for that matter) melt a Molex connector like that!!!

i had put it in a thermal take case and it was having issues saying the vid driver failed to load and once in a while it said the power to the vid card was un pluged. what happened was heat built up at the conector cheep craftsmanship? anyway to fix it i cut the pin of the ATI 9800 and drilled out both connectors and soldered a wire right to the board and purchased a 480W true blue Antec power supply these cards get hot 60c or about 140F is considered normal to me thats hot takes power to make heat well its all cured now ya thats automotive antifreez in the case now it wont even get to 100f i think 32c is all ive seen thats what 88f just above room temp when its taxed now thats cool

Ihave a Visiontek 9200 SE 128MB PCI. Should I install a fan right away? Does these cards still get hot if yor just on-line ...or just when your are gamming? Thanks Capt,n

they do get much hotter while gamming. That card i think has a passive heat sink and no fan im sur its fine the way it is. if get odd shappes and images when you play games it could be from over heating but im fairly sure your fine . people who have ther cards over heat get lockups and stuff 10 min into a game.

bluemagic98 is right. The 9200 SE is a fairly low speed GPU video card. Even the 9600's don't get that warm. There are 3 speed favors: 9600, 9600 PRO, and 9600 XT. The XT has a fan and does start to get warm. Also, the DDR RAM can get too warm also with these high speed cards.

I have a 9800 PRO and watch it's temp closely. I also bought some copper heat sinks for the RAM chips. This is ESPECIALLY necessary if you intend to overclock these boards.