I just installed new drivers on a relative’s computer. The Radeon 9800 pro was working fine before but now the screen scrambles and freezes in 3D games. I swaped it with another card and it works. I’m thinking it’s just a coincidence and the card was about to die. But I was wondering if anyone here might know of something else I might try. I’d rather not have to buy another card.

I did the usual, uninstalled the previous drivers and software and used Driver Cleaner.

So are you saying that after the drivers were removed that the display is still corrupted?

Then I would use an older driver that works well with the 9800 Firmware for that card. The 9800 are known for sudden death also...

Normally I would have just chucked it in the trash. Used gaming cards have usually been overclocked to death. But this time I cleaned it, reapplied thermal paste, underclocked it, moved it to another machine and used older drivers. It worked for almost 3 hours.
So I’m out $30.00 for a new video card and I’ve sworn off fixing relatives computers.