You can actually solder new ram chips on graphics cards?
Heck, maybe the cheapest would be to ask on any forums for broken cards for free! 😜

Yes, A friend of mine have an one of those factory soldering machines, I don't know how those are called, "robotic soldering machines"??

He uses it to repair all kind of electronics, Motherboards, Video cards and even cell phones, the hard task is to find parts for refactions.

Heck, maybe the cheapest would be to ask on any forums for broken cards for free!

That's probably the best source. Those BGA chips can occasionally be found on eBay, most listings are for lower speed chips, but you will sometimes find higher speed ones if you watch for 'em. One question, though... have you tried just doing a reball/reflow on the existing chips? It's far more common for the joints to break loose than it is for the chips to actually go bad, unless they were burned out with too much voltage or something.

As for the GF2, DDR SGRAM is gonna be damn near impossible to find unless you salvage it from another card. That stuff has been out of production for close to 10 years. The thing is, though, looking at it realistically, another broken GF2 (or other card with similar RAM) is probably going to be considerably harder to come by than a complete working one, since most people will have long since thrown out a 10 year old broken card. I hate to say it, but it may make more sense to replace that one, rather than trying to fix it...

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

One question, though... have you tried just doing a reball/reflow on the existing chips? It's far more common for the joints to break loose than it is for the chips to actually go bad, unless they were burned out with too much voltage or something.

This guy also has some kind of scanner ( sorry for sounding like a complete idiot but i'm not a techinician and I don't know how those machines are called) wich tells him wiich chips need to be replaced, a reflow won't do anything since cold soldering points isn't the problem with this video cards.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Heck, maybe the cheapest would be to ask on any forums for broken cards for free!

That's probably the best source. Those BGA chips can occasionally be found on eBay, most listings are for lower speed chips, but you will sometimes find higher speed ones if you watch for 'em. One question, though... have you tried just doing a reball/reflow on the existing chips? It's far more common for the joints to break loose than it is for the chips to actually go bad, unless they were burned out with too much voltage or something.

As for the GF2, DDR SGRAM is gonna be damn near impossible to find unless you salvage it from another card. That stuff has been out of production for close to 10 years. The thing is, though, looking at it realistically, another broken GF2 (or other card with similar RAM) is probably going to be considerably harder to come by than a complete working one, since most people will have long since thrown out a 10 year old broken card. I hate to say it, but it may make more sense to replace that one, rather than trying to fix it...

It's true that virtually all people will toss out broken hardware, but there are those people (like me! 😜) who keep defective hardware around for a while and then do a big cleanup. Recently I went through all my untested stuff and found a small stack of graphics card that I tested as dead (even after cleaning the contacts), and I know theres some early geforces in there.

The thing is, when I test hardware and find it won't work right away, I never toss it after 1 test only, as there may have been something I have overlooked (and on more then one occasion, hardware I tested as "defective" at first (or I should say, hardware I couldn't get running the 1st try) weren't defective after all when I retested it a couple months/years later. So I tend to keep certain hardware parts around even though I labelled it as "Defective?" (note the question mark 😉 ).

If you're looking for particular graphics cards to salvage parts from, if you want I could go have a look and see what I've got 😉

Ah, I didn't know how thoroughly it had been investigated... yeah, if you pull the chips off the card and they test bad in a chip tester (I dunno what they're officially called either), then it is indeed a good bet that they're bad.

But like I said before, you're not entirely outta luck. For example, it may be worth contacting this guy... he has a bunch of different GDDR chips, including the 3.3ns version of those Hynix chips, so there's a decent chance he could get ahold of the 2.8ns version or some suitable equivalent.

That would be great, but I don't know where to look for in order to get the right chips;

basically what we have been doing was to get 1 functional card for the price of 2 broken ones from the same brand, and I am aware that the type of memory used varies according to the manufacturer, i.e: MSI, Asus, Sapphire, Chaintec etc.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

But like I said before, you're not entirely outta luck. For example, it may be worth contacting this guy... he has a bunch of different GDDR chips, including the 3.3ns version of those Hynix chips, so there's a decent chance he could get ahold of the 2.8ns version or some suitable equivalent.

That reminds me, not long ago I saw someone on Ebay selling UMC 8881 CHIPSETS NOS in BGA!
Could mean it's possible (in theory) to build BRAND NEW 486 BOARDS around them 😁

Oh well...dreams are nice, right? 😜

It'd be hilarious to run a 486 with AGP, PCI and ISA, with support for DDR memory 😁

How does your friend test the individual components on the cards? The farthest I can go with that is use my volt meter and test if the capacitors and resistors are within specifications (although depending on where they are on the card, that may or may not be readily apparent even with the volt meter). Chip testers as others have mentioned might work, but does your friend have to remove the chips before testing them?

You piqued my curiosity when you mentioned a Voodoo5. I've got one that was in a lot of dead cards recently that had a busted off capacitor. I re-soldered it using a lead and the capacitance comes up right on my volt meter, but still no dice. Is the failure part on the V5 a solder joint issue, or is it the VSA 100 chip or the ram?

SavantStrike wrote:

Chip testers as others have mentioned might work, but does your friend have to remove the chips before testing them?

It might be a chip tester, I don't know how that "table" with cables and hookups is called, he don't need to remove the chips in order to test them, this guy also has some "specific" knowledge about how this things work ( he used to work at a Compaq plant in Manaus-Brasil)

SavantStrike wrote:

You piqued my curiosity when you mentioned a Voodoo5. I've got one that was in a lot of dead cards recently that had a busted off capacitor. I re-soldered it using a lead and the capacitance comes up right on my volt meter, but still no dice. Is the failure part on the V5 a solder joint issue, or is it the VSA 100 chip or the ram?

I really don't know what he did to that Voodoo 5, he doesn't remember exactly what he did to the card either, the thing used to show artifacts soon after the boot screen, looking at the board he told me that it's possible that he replaced some dead capacitors/resistors and ram chips aswell, not really sure.