No, it had copper wire at the back, directly touching PCB with no isolation. And the second revelation was that there was no thermal paste and the heatsink was wobbling on the chip 😖 This card had a hard life.

mv_cz wrote:

No, it had copper wire at the back, directly touching PCB with no isolation. And the second revelation was that there was no thermal paste and the heatsink was wobbling on the chip 😖 This card had a hard life.

DSC02072.JPG

What baffles me is someone had the intelligence to understand a bit about heatsinks and wanted to put a bigger one on, but completely disregarded electrical insulation.

xplus93 wrote:

mv_cz wrote:

No, it had copper wire at the back, directly touching PCB with no isolation. And the second revelation was that there was no thermal paste and the heatsink was wobbling on the chip 😖 This card had a hard life.

DSC02072.JPG

What baffles me is someone had the intelligence to understand a bit about heatsinks and wanted to put a bigger one on, but completely disregarded electrical insulation.

Nice kludge!

Both the wire (at least many copper wires do) and the board has a non conductive layer (the components do not). The ends of the copper wire looks like it could short some SMD components though but they were probably angled out when the card was used.

Not that I think it's a great idea to use copper wire to mount heat sinks on video cards but I can totally see it working! 😁

gotten myself another Asus A7N8X Deluxe to replace my current one which has a broken Ram port, its in dire need of recapping though (was a bargain and comes with a Barton 3200+), going to use chemicon caps (the only reason I ain't using panasonics is because chemicons are red for the matching red color with my build)
Another bargain came in as a Thermaltake Shark case (alluminium is in poor condition, nothing Belgom can't fix though) and a Antec 330True also requires recapping (filled with fujyyu caps 😠 , expected more from Antec). Replacing 8 caps in total, 2 of them are bulging the rest is just a precaution.

The thermaltake originally had blue leds, these were not included I don't mind though as I will be purchasing new leds for it anyway.

Well my XFX 7950 GT arrived! Great news, it works flawlessly with no artifacts, no issues..... other than it runs hotter than the sun. Just sticking it in my computer (antec 300 with two front fans aimed right at it) has it running 85c - 88c in 3dmark 2003, and I soon found out why.. XFX used crappy inferior white thermal paste under the heatsink, and it was old and not really "paste" anymore. Also with it off I thought I'd give you folks the chance to see under the heatsink on these things. Turns out despite what I had hoped.. nope XFX didn't contact the heatsink with the thermal pads. I think I'll be cutting the white thermal pads out of this old dead FX-4500 heatsink and try putting em on the ram chips for this one see if it helps when I put it back together. But replacing this "paste" (if you can call it that) with arctic silver 5 and we'll see if it runs better. Also turns out the seller lied and despite posting the part # for the XXX series card in the ebay listing, I actually only got the normal "Extreme" card instead.. sad days. But I already tested and it will run fine pushed up just a little to 650 mhz core (7900 GTX speed), tried pushing up ram a little but it didn't like it. We'll see what it does with the chips contacting the heatsink in a little while. But YAY! I finally got a working 7900 card! Only took 2.5 years searching. And I do think these XFX Silent Extreme series cards, most likely the "binned chips" where they "Cherry picked" the best quality chips seems to be true... forget who it was here on vogons that has two of em.. both of his worked. And now I got one and mine works fine. So maybe these are the cards to buy if we want working 7900 cards.

Pictures.

Large: http://i.imgur.com/SKVrgqr.jpg

Got another beige ATX tower from a thrift store. Had a s478 uninteresting P4+P4 CPU in it, but for €10 I couldn't leave it there. I couldn't open it up in the shop and I was in a hurry, so I basically just loaded it in 🤣
Graphics card turned out to be a 128MB GF4. It's the 4200 variant, but this is only the 2nd GF4 non-MX I got now. Nice!

It also included a 80GB IDE drive, which is also nice and it had a couple non-matching DDR 512MB modules. The PSU was of a crap brand though, I haven't bothered to have a better look at the mobo yet..

Tetrium wrote:

Got another beige ATX tower from a thrift store. Had a s478 uninteresting P4+P4 CPU in it, but for €10 I couldn't leave it there. I couldn't open it up in the shop and I was in a hurry, so I basically just loaded it in 🤣
Graphics card turned out to be a 128MB GF4. It's the 4200 variant, but this is only the 2nd GF4 non-MX I got now. Nice!

It also included a 80GB IDE drive, which is also nice and it had a couple non-matching DDR 512MB modules. The PSU was of a crap brand though, I haven't bothered to have a better look at the mobo yet..

Really like the geforce4 ti cards, great performers. I had no problems sourcing the ti4200 64 and 128mb models but had a VERY hard time finding a working ti4600. Bought a couple of them trough time but they always came DOA.
Recently found a good one, it is a MSI version and i bought it together with a ti4400 from leadtek.

Trying to complete the full Nvidia agp series (Riva128- to- 7900GS agp) with mostly the highend versions from each series (ultra's, Ti's etc) and i'm getting there finally.
I never use Ebay so finding cards can sometimes be a big challenge...

Only 4 cards still missing which i think should be in the collection to complete it:

Geforce256 DDR (have the sdram Geforce256)
Geforce2 ultra (have GTS, Pro and Ti) unbelievable that i STILL haven't found one
Geforce 5800ultra (have normal FX5800 and several Quadro versions but a man can dream, right?),
Geforce 7950GT agp (and/or the 7800 Gainward BLISS version with 24 pipes, have the normal 7800GS and 7900GS agp)

Did find a Geforce2 Ultra from the Prophet series at the scrapper which i think is a VERY nice version of the card but unfortunately it missed a couple of components and was beyond repair so i left it 😢

I just bought a HP XW6000 dual Xeon Workstation from year 2002 for £9.74 + £15.55 shipping. It's one of the the last real Compaq computers even if it's HP branded. The quality is amazing and the parts inside still have Compaq branding.

I already own an XW6000 system but I like to have a spare motherboard and a spare power supply as I'm abusing the system I already have by using power hungry CPUs and video card. It turned out to be cheaper to buy a whole system than a spare Power Supply. Motherboards can be had for next to nothing though as they are useless without the special Compaq PSU. The PSU is WTX but Compaq added some handshaking signals making it next to impossible to replace it with any other PSU than a handfull of thier own ones. The most powerful one in the compatible series of PSUs is the one that comes with the XW6000 so there are no upgrades.

HP (Compaq) XW6000.

meljor wrote:

Really like the geforce4 ti cards, great performers. I had no problems sourcing the ti4200 64 and 128mb models but had a VERY ha […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote:

Got another beige ATX tower from a thrift store. Had a s478 uninteresting P4+P4 CPU in it, but for €10 I couldn't leave it there. I couldn't open it up in the shop and I was in a hurry, so I basically just loaded it in 🤣
Graphics card turned out to be a 128MB GF4. It's the 4200 variant, but this is only the 2nd GF4 non-MX I got now. Nice!

It also included a 80GB IDE drive, which is also nice and it had a couple non-matching DDR 512MB modules. The PSU was of a crap brand though, I haven't bothered to have a better look at the mobo yet..

Really like the geforce4 ti cards, great performers. I had no problems sourcing the ti4200 64 and 128mb models but had a VERY hard time finding a working ti4600. Bought a couple of them trough time but they always came DOA.
Recently found a good one, it is a MSI version and i bought it together with a ti4400 from leadtek.

Trying to complete the full Nvidia agp series (Riva128- to- 7900GS agp) with mostly the highend versions from each series (ultra's, Ti's etc) and i'm getting there finally.
I never use Ebay so finding cards can sometimes be a big challenge...

Only 4 cards still missing which i think should be in the collection to complete it:

Geforce256 DDR (have the sdram Geforce256)
Geforce2 ultra (have GTS, Pro and Ti) unbelievable that i STILL haven't found one
Geforce 5800ultra (have normal FX5800 and several Quadro versions but a man can dream, right?),
Geforce 7950GT agp (and/or the 7800 Gainward BLISS version with 24 pipes, have the normal 7800GS and 7900GS agp)

Did find a Geforce2 Ultra from the Prophet series at the scrapper which i think is a VERY nice version of the card but unfortunately it missed a couple of components and was beyond repair so i left it 😢

GF4 definitely is an interesting card, but for whatever reason I ran into more GF3 and FX 5900U cards than I ran into any GF4. It was a very long time till I even had a single GF4. The very first one was from a friend who's sA rig died like 2 years ago and it's technically not even my card (yet) as it's still his property.

I guess I'm a bit of a rare breed in that I don't actively seek the Ultras and I actually have a soft spot for the slower models. My GF6800 (vanilla) served me well for years and the slower models tend to just keep going and going 😀

I have more missing spots (particularly the GF1) but I don't mind too much. Fastest GF7 card I have are the 2 GF7600GS cards and both served me well for several years and both should still be functional, I took good care of them 😀

I guess you've got a very substantial collection of cards right now? I ran into other things which kept me from doing much retro computing related stuff lately.

kithylin wrote:

Well my XFX 7950 GT arrived! Great news, it works flawlessly with no artifacts, no issues..... other than it runs hotter than th […]
Show full quote

Well my XFX 7950 GT arrived! Great news, it works flawlessly with no artifacts, no issues..... other than it runs hotter than the sun. Just sticking it in my computer (antec 300 with two front fans aimed right at it) has it running 85c - 88c in 3dmark 2003, and I soon found out why.. XFX used crappy inferior white thermal paste under the heatsink, and it was old and not really "paste" anymore. Also with it off I thought I'd give you folks the chance to see under the heatsink on these things. Turns out despite what I had hoped.. nope XFX didn't contact the heatsink with the thermal pads. I think I'll be cutting the white thermal pads out of this old dead FX-4500 heatsink and try putting em on the ram chips for this one see if it helps when I put it back together. But replacing this "paste" (if you can call it that) with arctic silver 5 and we'll see if it runs better. Also turns out the seller lied and despite posting the part # for the XXX series card in the ebay listing, I actually only got the normal "Extreme" card instead.. sad days. But I already tested and it will run fine pushed up just a little to 650 mhz core (7900 GTX speed), tried pushing up ram a little but it didn't like it. We'll see what it does with the chips contacting the heatsink in a little while. But YAY! I finally got a working 7900 card! Only took 2.5 years searching. And I do think these XFX Silent Extreme series cards, most likely the "binned chips" where they "Cherry picked" the best quality chips seems to be true... forget who it was here on vogons that has two of em.. both of his worked. And now I got one and mine works fine. So maybe these are the cards to buy if we want working 7900 cards.

Pictures.

Large: http://i.imgur.com/SKVrgqr.jpg

That's odd. My cards have thermal pads between the large black radiator and the video memory. They also had a gray thermal compound (witch I replaced). I'll see if I can find some pics.

Picked up a few sound modules recently:

Shponglefan wrote:

Picked up a few sound modules recently: […]
Show full quote

Picked up a few sound modules recently:

Wow, the SD-90, nice! Did you find a decent deal on it? Seems to go for a lot on ebay.

Qjimbo wrote:

Wow, the SD-90, nice! Did you find a decent deal on it? Seems to go for a lot on ebay.

Yeah, most of the Japan eBay prices are ~$300 to $400. I got this one for $200. Not sure if that's a decent deal or not, but it was the cheapest I could find.

It did have the caveat that it had some residual "smoke smell". That turned out to be an understatement as the thing reeked of smoke. I cleaned it and have been airing it out. I'm hoping in a week or so, the smell should be gone.

meljor wrote:

Geforce 5800ultra (have normal FX5800 and several Quadro versions but a man can dream, right?),

That's almost literally impossible territory. There were few of them to begin with and large chunk of ultra cards died before 2010. But lets face it, that is just infamous Nvidia cooler abomination and preflashed 500/1000 bios. Quadro and normal FX5800 have exactly same PCB and memory.

meljor wrote:

Geforce 7950GT agp (and/or the 7800 Gainward BLISS version with 24 pipes, have the normal 7800GS and 7900GS agp)

And what is stopping you? There are at least three 7800GS+ (24 pipes) cards on ebay right now: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=Gainward … 7800GS&_sacat=0

kanecvr wrote:

That's odd. My cards have thermal pads between the large black radiator and the video memory. They also had a gray thermal compound (witch I replaced). I'll see if I can find some pics.

This was mine when I took it apart. Although bear in mind I do have the "Extreme" card and I believe yours are the XXX cards. Perhaps with the XXX they included ram pads and better TIM. It's a possibility.

Mine went something like this: stock "stick it in the machine and nothing else" = 85c - 88c core temps, replacing TIM with grey arctic silver 5 = 65c-72c temps. Mounting a 60mm fan on the heatsink on the back of it, connecting it to the onboard fan header, and putting in a custom fan curve in the computer via afterburner for 30% fan @ 55c = constant gaming temps of 50c-55c usually, even in demanding titles. Didn't get a lot of time testing I'm happy. A little work and I've almost halved the temps on it. 55c is -tons- better. Hope it lasts now. I haven't investigated if I can get it working with win98 yet, still playing with it in XP on my P4 computer. And I may later investigate trying to modify it's bios to see if I can program in a custom fan curve. By default it pushes this fan to 100% @ 55c and it's noisy. I also disassembled a broken quadro card, and sacrificed another one of my other quadro cards I don't care for (paid $3 for it) and now have full thermal pads on all the ram chips as well to contact to this heatsink.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

That's almost literally impossible territory. There were few of them to begin with and large chunk of ultra cards died before 20 […]
Show full quote

meljor wrote:

Geforce 5800ultra (have normal FX5800 and several Quadro versions but a man can dream, right?),

That's almost literally impossible territory. There were few of them to begin with and large chunk of ultra cards died before 2010. But lets face it, that is just infamous Nvidia cooler abomination and preflashed 500/1000 bios. Quadro and normal FX5800 have exactly same PCB and memory.

meljor wrote:

Geforce 7950GT agp (and/or the 7800 Gainward BLISS version with 24 pipes, have the normal 7800GS and 7900GS agp)

And what is stopping you? There are at least three 7800GS+ (24 pipes) cards on ebay right now: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=Gainward … 7800GS&_sacat=0

Are you sure those are the 24 pipe version?

I own at least 4 Gainward Geforce 7800GS Bliss 512MB, 3 of them use the other dual slot cooler and all have 20:7:20:16 core config using the G71 core. The clocks are 450/1250 and 500/1400, I don't remember which I have two of. I also have a single one with the same cooler as in the Ebay links but I don't think I ever tested that one, that card is probably in a box in a storage unit so I can't check.

The legend says there were only 1500 cards made in total with all 24 pipes enabled.

Edit fixed typo.

With "78GS+" part on a sticker?

The Serpent Rider wrote:

With "78GS+" part on a sticker?

I actually have one of them on the test bench right in front of me! 😀

This one use G71 with 20:7:20:16 core config, the clocks are 450 core 1250 mem. It overclocks as high as you dare to go though... I run it at 550 / 1400 but it can do much higher clocks. I dont want to burn power traces going to the AGP slot...

P/N:XNA/780GS+T352-PM8370-GS

Edit.

I noticed this is the exact same part number as at least 3 out of the 4 cards on Ebay, the 4th card diddn't have the part number specified.

This is the card I'm tinkering with at the moment.

/Edit

xplus93 wrote:

mv_cz wrote:

No, it had copper wire at the back, directly touching PCB with no isolation. And the second revelation was that there was no thermal paste and the heatsink was wobbling on the chip 😖 This card had a hard life.

DSC02072.JPG

What baffles me is someone had the intelligence to understand a bit about heatsinks and wanted to put a bigger one on, but completely disregarded electrical insulation.

That wire is insulated, there is varnish and if it didn't have that it would look like a copper penny would. High voltage transformers used this kind of wire.

kithylin wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

That's odd. My cards have thermal pads between the large black radiator and the video memory. They also had a gray thermal compound (witch I replaced). I'll see if I can find some pics.

This was mine when I took it apart. Although bear in mind I do have the "Extreme" card and I believe yours are the XXX cards. Perhaps with the XXX they included ram pads and better TIM. It's a possibility.

Mine went something like this: stock "stick it in the machine and nothing else" = 85c - 88c core temps, replacing TIM with grey arctic silver 5 = 65c-72c temps. Mounting a 60mm fan on the heatsink on the back of it, connecting it to the onboard fan header, and putting in a custom fan curve in the computer via afterburner for 30% fan @ 55c = constant gaming temps of 50c-55c usually, even in demanding titles. Didn't get a lot of time testing I'm happy. A little work and I've almost halved the temps on it. 55c is -tons- better. Hope it lasts now. I haven't investigated if I can get it working with win98 yet, still playing with it in XP on my P4 computer. And I may later investigate trying to modify it's bios to see if I can program in a custom fan curve. By default it pushes this fan to 100% @ 55c and it's noisy. I also disassembled a broken quadro card, and sacrificed another one of my other quadro cards I don't care for (paid $3 for it) and now have full thermal pads on all the ram chips as well to contact to this heatsink.

They don't work on win98 🙁 - no drivers...