kithylin wrote:

Bought myself a rather special GeForce 7950 GT card. […]
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Bought myself a rather special GeForce 7950 GT card.

Seller's photo:

What makes this special is I researched and confirmed the model # (and seller confirmed it on the sticker): this is XFX's "XXX" edition 512MB 7950 GT. The fastest stock-clocked 7950 GT that was made. Comes with stock clocks of 610 Mhz core / 1600 Mhz ram. nVidia reference clocks for the 7950 GT are 550 core / 1400 ram.

And the reason I bought this instead of a 7800 GTX? because almost all of the 7800 & 7900 GTX models are OEM's out of dell or something and they all seem to be not working in ebay, or the ones that are listed as used and not "as-is", are bulk sellers that just strip down 100 machines and stick em on ebay without testing to see if they work. I've messaged multiple sellers with "used" OEM-Looking 7800 GTX's and 7900 GTX's and they all write back "No testing performed, 30 day return warranty though!" just dun wanna screw with it. Also they want like $35 and up for 7800/7900's that may or may not work. This is almost 7900 GTX clocks, and faster than the 7800 GTX *just slightly*, and the seller confirmed to me in ebay messages he both tested it works and tried installing drivers and tested it in aquamark3d and said it passed and has no issues. Plus seller accepted my offer of $20, free shipping.

So after buying 6 different 7800 GTX series quadro cards from 6 different sellers over the course of 2016 and into 2017, fingers crossed I can finally get a working high-end 7000 series card. I do plan to find a way to mount a fan on this thing though. I may even try to see if I can mount one of these big heatpipe coolers off one of my dead 7800GTX-Quadro cards on it too if the holes line up. Might have to splice wires with the cables and fan connectors to get the fan to work with the power connector on this card to power it though. We'll see.. either way, I'm not running this thing fanless.

Main reason I want this card is to try slightly later modified drivers and see if I can get this to work in my 5-Ghz Pentium4 Windows98 PCI-E machine.

Supposedly from some old information I've found online, XFX basically "cherry picked" or "binned" the gpu chips for their XXX line, the best ones out of the lot, and as a result I'm hoping that will mean it's survived the years of "bumpgate" nvidia issues that killed almost 90% of the 7000-family of cards by 2017.

First off, can someone explain to me what bump gate is?

Second, to be fair, the Dell 7800GTXs were fairly well designed and there's a good chance they will work. You don't realize how absurdly beefy the cooler on those OEM 7800s are until you own one. Here's a picture taken in a way that should reveal this:

That's a large fan full coverage (in that it appears to cover the core, memory on both sides, and the power circuitry) cooler that's actually probably overkill for the task. 4 large heatpipes vent to additional cooling blocks at the front and rear. This Quadro is dead but I suspect a non-heat related issue. That's the same cooler Dell put on there 7800's. I've owned a 7800 (I need to post about that not so hilarious experience sometime) from EVGA that used the reference design and as far as cooling goes if I ever get a working 7800 (planned, but not budgeted atm) and the qaudro isn't revived by a bake I may very well put this cooler on it. It's a very good design. Proof there are at least a few brain cells rubbing together at whichever company designed this cooler.

Anywho, the BFG 7800GS OC AGP I had been working on is still dead and what's worse is I just discovered the RAM slots were preventing full insertion at first meaning it may have been working when I got it and my last ditch effort shower to clean the card may have killed it. That being said I think it was dead when I received as the cooler was full of black gunk and being a factory OC model the heat load with a blocked cooler must have been extreme. Does anyone want to suggest what temperature I should bake it at? I'm thinking 400F but I'm worried about the plastics on these older surface mount caps.

Another thought to recently cross my mind. My last lot of cards were packed in only bubble wrap. How bad is bubble wrap in terms of ESD? I almost wonder if it contributed to the 8/10 failure rate of that lot.

.

kithylin wrote:

Bumpgate is the name of the lawsuit about nvidia 7000 series cards.

I'am sorry, but do you even read your own links? Bumpgate fiasco has nothing to do with 110nm/90nm Nvidia chips.

.

I remember that scandal and it's all about horrible quality of G92 and later chips.

Bumpgate affects everything from 7000 series to 9000 series IIRC and in my experience. Iv baked three 8800gt and GTX cards with various degrees of longevity to attest to that, along with running into numerous 7000 series cards affected by that. Case in point, a $2000 HP laptop with a 7 series video chipset that was covered under the bumpgate lawsuit. Serpent Rider, you are semi-correct but wrong. As previously said it is a flaw with the SOLDER in the bump grid array of the chips, that Nvidia knew about. The solder overheats, causing the solder to crack and even the chipset it'self to crack and or warp. . .the 8k series in particular was affected I think because of the sheer power draw, remember that these are the first "Real" unified shader architecture units from Nvidia and had a stupid high TDP and average temp.

ODwilly wrote:

Bumpgate affects everything from 7000 series to 9000 series IIRC and in my experience. Iv baked three 8800gt and GTX cards with various degrees of longevity to attest to that, along with running into numerous 7000 series cards affected by that. Case in point, a $2000 HP laptop with a 7 series video chipset that was covered under the bumpgate lawsuit. Serpent Rider, you are semi-correct but wrong. As previously said it is a flaw with the SOLDER in the bump grid array of the chips, that Nvidia knew about. The solder overheats, causing the solder to crack and even the chipset it'self to crack and or warp. . .the 8k series in particular was affected I think because of the sheer power draw, remember that these are the first "Real" unified shader architecture units from Nvidia and had a stupid high TDP and average temp.

I removed my posts because all of this is terribly off-topic from this thread.

It's already been discussed, argued, and detailed in the past even on vogons over here: NV bumpgate lead-free solder debacle

It's not worth a big discussion or argument. Bottom line is the facts, and they are facts. And are a part of history now: There exists a defect in the manufacturing process of nvidia 7000 and 8000 series cards. It effected all of them from both families. There's nothing "baking in an oven" or anything like that can do to solve it. They will all die at some point in time sooner or later. If you find one working now, enjoy it while you can before it fails. Not all of them are dead, but the chances of finding any that still work today are slim.. I've had bad luck and only bought this one because the seller assures me he has it working a few days ago. And I'm hoping I can either bolt a fan to it's cooler or mount some sort of big aftermarket cooler on it to try and extend it's life as long as I can.. I don't know what I'll do yet but I'll be considering options. Keeping them as cool as possible should extend their life because it's a thermal problem that causes the failure and stresses the parts. I've been looking for a water cooled 8800 GTX for years.... they exist, just haven't had luck finding one. The water-cooled ones will probably be the only 8800 GTX's left at some point in time that still function.

I specifically wanted this XFX one because these XFX coolers make physical contact with all of the ram chips as well as the core, so putting a fan on it should make it cooler than usual. Most 7950 GT's I see on ebay only cool the core and not the ram chips. It's not that the ram chips get super hot per-say, I'd just like to cool as much of the card as I can if I have one. Keeping em cool is essential. I would even consider water cooling it if I can find anything to mount to it.

Anyway, we should probably get back on topic and share hardware instead.

spiroyster wrote:

[
Those were definately around in '98. Keep searching though... banging on corrugated iron induces more of a sense of music than what eminates from that piss poor excuse for a transducer o.0

🤣 The only reason I got this is so I could mix the Roland and SB and have separate volume control for both. It seems to work just fine in that regard. I don't care about the speakers, they were just bundled along.

All this talk of artifacting graphics cards just makes me flash back to my poor Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB. It was sitting in storage for the longest time, but I was about to flash it for Power Mac G4 use when the news struck me: ARTIFACTS. ARTIFACTS EVERYWHERE ON THE BIOS SCREEN.

Augh, another 9800 bites the dust. Should've kept my 9600 XT, as maybe that would've still worked for Core Image support without having to go out and buy another card.

The main incentive was that I got a Power Mac G4 MDD FW800 about a week ago. It came with a Radeon 7000, much weaker than the usual stock Radeon 9000, and it shows slight artifacting. Not enough to be unusable, but enough to be annoying regardless. That 9800 Pro, on the other hand? Even if it does POST, it's nigh unreadable, making any flashing efforts pointless.

I guess I'm out shopping for an AGP card I can flash that supports Core Image, and then pair that up with a Radeon 9200/9250 PCI for accelerated OS 9 (no Core Image-compatible card has OS 9 drivers). I'm thinking 6600 GT or 7800 GS for the OS X side of things, just to save me potential extension hell with an ATI card when booted into OS 9. (And before anyone points out the supposed inability for FW800 MDDs to boot OS 9: Mac OS 9 Lives. That is all.)

I would normally opt for a Voodoo5 5500 Mac PCI for OS 9, but let's just say you don't wanna see the eBay price history on those things. They make the AGP V5s look cheap!

At the very least, not only does it more or less work and came loaded with hard drives (two 80 GB and a 200 GB all functional, and a dead 120 GB drive, with the two 80 GB drives already packing Tiger and Leopard Server), but there was a SCSI controller and a Sonnet Tempo Trio card to boot. I moved the latter to my Power Mac 6500 just for the sake of giving that thing USB and FireWire on one PCI card, since when you've only got two slots, every card counts.

kanecvr wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

Yup. Love my MSI 5950 Ultra as well. I'm not using it tough since it tends to get pretty hot and these cards have a tendency to die due to thermal stress. I have a couple of Quadro FX 3000 cards (FX 5900 Ultra) and I use those.

Fair enough. I paid 25 for mine shipped with said cooling modifications done before hand on Amibay. I guess I got Lucky. I'd imagine you could probably get those 5900 based Quadros up to 5950U clocks anyways.

For me, buying something like this and not using it would be like buying a stock car to drive on Sundays. A complete waste. Unless something is exceedingly rare (for example the FX5800 Ultras) in which case I'm more likely to save it for special occasions.

5950 Ultra cards are pretty damn rare. There's none on ebay right now, and I've only seen two cards myself - the MSI I own and an ASUS back in the day - that's it.

Huh, I must be one lucky guy, for I found a 5950U in the same parts bin that turned up a 6800 Ultra AGP and Voodoo5 5500 AGP before for dirt cheap.

I recall it working, but then I found that one of the boxy caps on the back came loose from one of the solder pads... gonna have to replace that component, and replace my crappy soldering iron while I'm at it because it's not cutting it.

To be honest, I probably would've just left it there if not for this very forum pointing out the FX cards' DX8 and prior compatibility. I didn't have a very strong opinion on GeForce FX in general due to their infamously terrible DX9/SM 2.0 performance relative to the Radeon 9x00 lineup.

Bought this for my C64.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Commodore-64-VIC20-15 … loAAOSwopRYjTFX

A NOS heatsink/fan for my Pentium Pro system 😀 Happy I could find this one for just 10 euro! I got lucky!

kithylin wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

So.. as you can see, just because your cards have the cooler style, doesn't necessarily mean they're the XXX model.
Maybe yours are though so perhaps check the links and see which ones you ended up with.

They are clocked at 610 / 800 (1600 effective). This exact model: https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/2401/2401 (by vBIOS string) and reported clocks. They easily OC to 650 / 1600 (I refuse to OC video memory)

ODwilly wrote:

Bumpgate affects everything from 7000 series to 9000 series IIRC and in my experience. Iv baked three 8800gt and GTX cards with various degrees of longevity to attest to that, along with running into numerous 7000 series cards affected by that. Case in point, a $2000 HP laptop with a 7 series video chipset that was covered under the bumpgate lawsuit. Serpent Rider, you are semi-correct but wrong. As previously said it is a flaw with the SOLDER in the bump grid array of the chips, that Nvidia knew about. The solder overheats, causing the solder to crack and even the chipset it'self to crack and or warp. . .the 8k series in particular was affected I think because of the sheer power draw, remember that these are the first "Real" unified shader architecture units from Nvidia and had a stupid high TDP and average temp.

^^ THIS ^^

I was doing reballing back in the day and it's the 7xxx series and some nforce chipsets that started demand for it. Most affected were the 7xxx mobile cards, but problems were found with some desktop cards as well, and even high-end 6xxx GO chips - particularly the 6800 GO. I had dozens of DELL XPS, MSI's and other models with dead video chips. Most of the time the issue was with poor quality PCB that the GPU was packaged onto - the pads would tear off the packaging because it would warp under heat - it was that thin. Sometimes the PCB on the MXM module itself was worse quality and the chip would tear pads of that... in that case the whole module needed to be scrapped. In the case of on-motherboard soldered chips, the boards PCB was much stronger so pads would tear off the chip packaging so replacing the chip would fix the issue.

^^^ you can see damaged BGA pads on this example - the manufacturer added an inadequately thin layer of copper and used a poor quality bonding process when making the PCB. In some cases the resin itself would react to the heat+warping, making it thin and exposing copper in areas that should be isolated. In low-end cards they would sometimes forgo using copper altogether, replacing it with cheaper alternatives.

In part it's nvidia's fault for providing poor quality packaging and wide thermal margins, but also OEM's faults for installing barely adequate cooling solutions - sometimes in an effort to save money, other times in an attempt to make thinner / lighter devices.

The issue persisted well into the 8xxx / 9xxx series cards, but seems to have been fixed by the time they rolled out the GTX 4xx cards.

Recently I've seen Intel using really thin PCB to package skywell chips - and I've seen my share of i5 and i7 6xxx chips destroyed that way:

Got the for 5 bucks a piece. Luckily I got a peek under the heatsink to see the 3dfx logo. Can anybody identify this voodoo banshee?

Just bought this. No box, but the manual comes with it.

Found 4 desktops for sale in one bundle on craigslist for $30 near me. Scooped it up.

Dell Dimension 2400 (yuck) some early P4, turned on but no beep/video. Tried reseating RAM, differnet sticks, etc. no dice. The diagnostic lights indicated hte board is dead. There is a lot of rust on the case and other components (floppy drive in particular). I don't care for this machine at all so I gutted it and took out the CMOS battery, drives, IDE cables, even the PCI slot blanks. Tossing this one.

Dell Dimension 8200... yet another P4 but this one has 1,280MB RDRAM and no HD but I took the 80GB HD the 2400 had and put it in there. Has a GeForce2 card of some sort. Works fine, needs new CMOS battery.

Powerspec 6340 AMD Sempron 3000+ 2GHz processor, 1GB RAM, no HD, mobo has SATA and IDE. Integrated video on an MSI mATX board. Seems to work ok but the CPU cooler is noisy and vibrates a lot. I tried fixing it but to no avail. The case is a good mATX size so I might just get rid of the rest of the insides and build something else.

The reason why I pounced on this find... Dell Dimension XPS T600. I didn't know until I got home that it has the following... 600MHz PIII, 512MB RAM, DVDROM+CD/RW drives, floppy, zip drive, 13GB 7200RPM IBM HD, Turtle Beach Montego II PCI sound card (AU8830), modem, and... 3DFX Voodoo3 2000 16MB AGP. Pretty cool! Installing 98SE on it right now.

So the oldest one will be a good 98SE box, the 2400 is worthless, and I am not sure what to do with the 8200 and the Sempron. Suggestions welcome!

oeuvre wrote:

Found 4 desktops for sale in one bundle on craigslist for $30 near me. Scooped it up. […]
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Found 4 desktops for sale in one bundle on craigslist for $30 near me. Scooped it up.

Dell Dimension 2400 (yuck) some early P4, turned on but no beep/video. Tried reseating RAM, differnet sticks, etc. no dice. The diagnostic lights indicated hte board is dead. There is a lot of rust on the case and other components (floppy drive in particular). I don't care for this machine at all so I gutted it and took out the CMOS battery, drives, IDE cables, even the PCI slot blanks. Tossing this one.

Dell Dimension 8200... yet another P4 but this one has 1,280MB RDRAM and no HD but I took the 80GB HD the 2400 had and put it in there. Has a GeForce2 card of some sort. Works fine, needs new CMOS battery.

Powerspec 6340 AMD Sempron 3000+ 2GHz processor, 1GB RAM, no HD, mobo has SATA and IDE. Integrated video on an MSI mATX board. Seems to work ok but the CPU cooler is noisy and vibrates a lot. I tried fixing it but to no avail. The case is a good mATX size so I might just get rid of the rest of the insides and build something else.

The reason why I pounced on this find... Dell Dimension XPS T600. I didn't know until I got home that it has the following... 600MHz PIII, 512MB RAM, DVDROM+CD/RW drives, floppy, zip drive, 13GB 7200RPM IBM HD, Turtle Beach Montego II PCI sound card (AU8830), modem, and... 3DFX Voodoo3 2000 16MB AGP. Pretty cool! Installing 98SE on it right now.

So the oldest one will be a good 98SE box, the 2400 is worthless, and I am not sure what to do with the 8200 and the Sempron. Suggestions welcome!

Dimension 8200 can be a nice P4 RDRAM build, check the geforce card, it can be a Geforce 2 GTS or a Geforce 2 MX
The Sempron 3000+ 2 ghz is a Socket A CPU which is basically a rebranded Athlon XP 2900+ Barton, can be a nice XP or a fast 98 SE buiid
The Dimension 2400 doesn't look good, especially since is dead and really limited, i'd suggest taking the CPU and RAM as well since it might be useful or sell the CPU

It's a 2 MX. I'm planning on putting 98SE on that Sempron machine since I have XP covered already

Picked up this lot on eBay. From top left to right.

Asus Mach64 PCI
Diamond Stealth S3 Trio64
STB Nitro S3 VirgeGX
OEM TNT2 m64 AGP (not really interesting)
Number Nine S3 Trio with a weird IBM chip in it
ATI Mach32 PCI
OEM Cirrus Logic ISA
ATI Mach64 PCI with memory upgrade slots

dexvx wrote:

Picked up this lot on eBay. From top left to right. […]
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Picked up this lot on eBay. From top left to right.

Asus Mach64 PCI
Diamond Stealth S3 Trio64
STB Nitro S3 VirgeGX
OEM TNT2 m64 AGP (not really interesting)
Number Nine S3 Trio with a weird IBM chip in it
ATI Mach32 PCI
OEM Cirrus Logic ISA
ATI Mach64 PCI with memory upgrade slots

The number nine card with the IBM chip is not a Trio64, is an S3 Vision968

Carlos S. M. wrote:

The number nine card with the IBM chip is not a Trio64, is an S3 Vision968

Yes, you're right. I guess they were pre-Trio.

Anyone know why the Asus Mach64 is so tiny and the other one huge in comparison?