Been having trouble with an old 4850 for a while. I pulled the card and cleaned it and after a month or so, the system is shutting down and I find the card is overheating. I finally brought it out to the garage and blew the thing out with a 40 Gallon compressor at about 100 PSI. I made sure to hold the fan in place, so as not to over rev the thing and mess it up. A bunch of dust came out, so I was very pleased. This last week, the card again was running with the temps in the mid 90C range. I put an extra fan on it to help with the cooling, but over the last 2 days, the system has been shutting down. I took the card out tonight to see what I could find out. I don't know if this will work across all makes of cards and I also don't recommend doing this without some thermal paste handy. I figured the card was going to go soon, so what did I have to loose. I started by removing screws. First the ones that hold the fan shroud/housing onto the card, and then the ones that hold the large heatsink to the main chip, thus seperating the board from the rest of the heatsink and fan. I figured I was going to find something scorched or broken. Instead, I found almost all of the air flow passages were clogged tight with dust. I found this hard to beleive since I pushed so much air through it with the compressor. I was able to dislodge the mess and clean up the passages. I found for these delicate matters, an old make up brush puts a gentle touch on things. I figured while I was at it, I might as well clean the blades on the fan, by holding it in place and using a medium firm toothbrush. I then cleaned the chip from all the old thermal paste and the corresponding mating surface. I re-applied new paste and slowly began the rebuild. Happy to say that it is now cruising along on this machine, running in the low 60's C. Hope this will help anybody experiencing the same problems.
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