ATI x1950 Pro Crashing / Artifacts Problem
By nick | Gaming, Tech Support30 Nov 2009
One of the boxes here has a ATI x1950 Pro graphics card in it, it’s pretty old now and was never anything special although still manages to play all the latest games (Fallout 3, Borderlands etc) without any problem, maybe this is down to the rest of the system. Recently the system has been locking up and/or displaying lots of random pixels all over the screen (Matrix style!) so we figured it was time to upgrade this poor 4+ year old card.
After spending a couple of minutes searching Google it seemed that a lot of other people are having the same problem, it looked like it was just a manufacturing fault and there was nothing I could do about it. Lots of people over the Internets suggested the problem was down to overheating and a fix could be to under clock the memory, this seemed a little lame on an already out dated graphics card. The point of this post is to provide a solution for other poor souls with this issue (there seems to be many of them out there).
After cracking open the tower and removing the graphics card I was amazed to see thick and hard dust that was almost preventing the fan from rotating. After taking off the cover there was a good 8mm of well packed dust blocking any air from getting into the pipes of the heat sink. A good few minutes of blasting the card with a air gun and cleaning the rest of the system at the same time, the card now idles at 40c instead of 80c with no more crashing, problem solved 
ATI x1950 Pro graphics corruption / crashing solution = Remove dust from neglected graphics card