Radeon 9100 Video card changes from 128mb to 8mb randomly

I have a viper 400 motherboard with a xp2400+ processor and 512 megs or ram.

My problem right now is with my video card.

so im going to break it down the best I can.

Just recently when I started having this problem , I looked at the Fan on my Video card.
It was fried .(I think dust is to blame)
so I took at old fan off of a heat sync
and unplugged the old fan and attached it to my video cards heat sync...
no luck , I think the damage has already been done...

when I turn on my power I can't look at the boot up process because my monitor will not turn on. I get an oarnge light and maybe 10% of the time it will boot up the way it should .
if it does boot up corectly ,, the video card will read at 128 megs.under the video settings
if it boots up wrong it will be 8 megs.

the monitor will finally snap on when the welcom screen on windows xp loads up and the opening sound plays.

so as much feedback as i can get on this the better ....
If my card Is shot I won't be too pissed , because I was wanting a new video card anyway...

 

Doesn't sound good - I'm afraid I have to agree with your suspicion about the vid card being fried.

It obviously overheated when the fan died and now it can't display the basic character-mode video before Windows switches to a VGA mode.

I say replace it.