nforce4max wrote:Did you check to make sure that nothing broke off during the modding? I always put my cards in the freezer before trying to break the old epoxy. Chances are that there might be a crack somewhere and I did ruin a Banshee in the same way as your 4500. As for the card you can always get another 4500 and salvage the vram from your current 4500 😉
There's no physical cracks to the PCB. What I do to pop off the heatsinks normally is apply liquid from compressed air cans to cool down the chips (this way the whole card isn't frozen).
The VRAMs could very well could have died. There are some listed on ebay: samsung also had produced faster variants as well.
At this point my two suspects are the VRAMs, or the scratch on the VSA-100's PCB I did-- the VSA-100 chip has a lower PCB with very small traces.
sliderider wrote:The 4500 can be upgraded to 64mb, but the one example I have seen of a homebrew 64mb 4500 also had some wires connecting various […]
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The 4500 can be upgraded to 64mb, but the one example I have seen of a homebrew 64mb 4500 also had some wires connecting various things so I don't think it's just a straightforward case of plugging in the chips and having it automatically recognize the extra memory. I think there is more that needs to be done.
This card sold on ebay last year
That's the 4500 PCI version, which is quite different in construction. The 4500 AGP one has four empty solder pads. I was curious if the AGP version would automatically accept the RAM soldered on the unused pads or not.
RogueTrip2012 wrote:Maybe bake it in an oven? If its a BGA joint maybe it will mend. I'd go over it looking for nicks or cuts in the PCB.
I already baked the card in the oven as per above. It actually melted the "4.7" coil a bit. That'll have to be replaced, as well as the SMT electrolytics, because they're old capacitors, and being heated like that isn't good.
swaaye wrote:Popping a glued heatsink off certainly puts tremendous force on the BGA solder. I have pulled chips right off of a PCB doing this. 😀
The BGA joints are fine, and have been reflowed. I can always use a heat gun for being more direct.
I [accidentally] made a small vertical scratch on the VSA-100's lower PCB, which may have affected some of the traces. No copper is showing, but those traces are so fine they could have been "smushed". So that's one of my suspicions...
It's either that or the VRAMs suffered ESD or were affected by the alcohol I was using to clean the remaining "STB snot glue" from the VSA-100 surface.
