AMD Radeon HD 6450 heat sink radiator failure

So we are nearing the 50% failure point...  I caught the IT guy stealing video cards from my undeployed inventory, so now I have a bunch of vga-only machines...

So should we just wait till all of our motherboards fail from being shorted out, before we get cards, or should we be proactive?  But yes, this is a systemic failure from a very poorly designed heat sink.  The heat sink walls are too thin to properly contain the pressure of the phase change fluid (probably water) when heated to the working temperature for months at a time.

You can resurrect a card by loosening the screws, if the card isn't already dead, loosing the screws will provide added expansion room for the pregnant radiator.  You may see the card de-flex and return to an almost normal appearance on the back side...

Agreed.

We have a lab of 120 of these, and while only 3 have failed since 2011 (to my knowledge) when we last popped the sides off to do a thorough cleaning at least 30% of the lab were showing signs of warping.

I just took apart 5 OptiPlex 790's.  Each had 2 AMD 6450 video cards.  About half of them the heatsink had expanded and broke the *** holding it onto the board.  These computers are 3.5 years old and just out of warranty.

Be careful when you handle these graphics cards, and the heat sink looks like that. It could explode, I know. It happened today when I was a little bit curios and loosened the heat sink from the graphics card. The bang sounded like a gunshot, and if I had hold the heat sink it would probably hurt.

This started happening to us. Computer on, no video. We tried a different monitor, still no video. I opened the system to check the video card. The heatsink had EXPANDED, warped, and damaged the video card! I had never seen a heatsink swell up like that. It looked like a swollen battery.

I went to Dell's website to do a warranty request - the warranty page asks you to run a diagnostic program before they send you a new card! That's kind of hard to do if the computer won't power on.

I was able to start an online Chat and request a card that way. We purchased several OptiPlex 790 systems that have the Radeon HD6450 card. I'm NOT looking forward to all of them breaking!

We have several 790s with these cards and it happened to us as well:

Cards are getting very distorted which causes dammage to the circuit board and failure.

Guaranty ended 6 months ago...

So yeah, it's systematic failure.

we're starting to see this mangled card on our 990's. Ours is under warranty until 2017.

I wonder if it's worth to call in warranty since the main board has a video card, and we don't use it for 3d apps, mainly office apps.

Another one of these failed Dell video cards. This is at least the 3rd I've had that has failed in the same manner. Fortunately this computer was under warranty.

If your video card has had the heat sink expand like this, it is defective and needs to be warrantied immediately regardless of whether it still works or not. It WILL fail and presents an explosion hazard. If your car started warping like this would you hope it just magically gets better and continues to work? At this point I'm pretty sure the heat sink is making electrical contact with other components which has caused the failure, mind you it may also be the cracking of the circuit board which has caused failure.

Furthermore, what a complete crock that Dell refuses to acknowledge that this is a problem with this card and will not issue a recall.

There has been no recall of these video cards. Per the purchased Dell warranty period, you should contact your Dell TAM (Technical Account Manager). Provide to the TAM all of the effected system service tag numbers. The TAM should issue video card exchanges. Any Home users should contact the normal Technical Support channel to have the video card exchanged.