I have a slightly workable but "difficult to explain late at night" problem in that my graphics card fried itself, or rather the fan filled it's bearing up with dust and Skyrim finally got things hot enough for my graphics card to conk out and corrupt it's drivers. To compound the issue there's no integrated graphics chip on my motherboard. A bit of an oversight I admit. Turns out for some time the fan had been like this as a strange noise has gone away. As it happens I've been playing Crysis on an AMD HD5870 with no properly functioning fan! and its been in this condition without me figuring out and dismissing it as a weird resonance issue for a year or so. That's a testament to these damn card's pure grit at least. I'm for the time being stuck using a nVidia GeForce 7300 LE. This thing struggles when I want to watch video in 1080p. I'm in a situation where my new card is coming to me in a couple of weeks, AMD R9 280x. It should do me great. Here's the thing, my old HD 5870 here is a working card, needs a new fan or cooler if I can't find a fan that fits but I know this thing can work in it's current state, it has been for about a year without me figuring it out. I disassembled and cleaned it out; noticing that no amount of compressed air would have helped it, and I'm fairly meticulous anyway with my PC de-dusting and this took the cake. I needed to take the thing apart and use a paintbrush and cocktail sticks to get that dust out! it really packs it into it's own cooler. Windows restoration points haven't really done much for the drivers so I'm also stuffed in that regard. The drivers now no longer exist. With the power management the drivers give my GPU it can actually play games with a fan that only spins when temperatures reach critical and the PC gives them their full voltage but they do something nice: drop the voltage of my GPU. Under clocking has proven a little bit useless in this regard because my monitor doesn't stay on long enough for me to try. Without the drivers and the power management aspect of them my GPU overheats and shuts off somewhere in between a few seconds and five minutes, and I can't install my drivers as they can't detect the relevant device. By the time any installers get that far my 5870 has decided to overheat. I want to see if there's a way to get the drivers on here with a card that will not work for more than 3 minutes at a time unless the drivers are on here. Its not a matter of anything other than wondering if its possible. Remember I have a second GPU here, just not a very good one. if it works I'd at least appreciate being able to watch game of thrones on something other than mein laptop.
That sucks man. I know the struggle of using that 7300 LE. Total piece of crap. Luckily you will be very happy with that 280x. I'm happy with mine.
