Meatball wrote on 2022-08-25, 20:16:

This GTX 580 was listed as new and never used. Not only does have video corruption (no matter which DVI or HDMI port is used), but it BSODs Windows whenever its driver is installed, too. I've seen some video corruption cure itself once the card warms up, but not this one. I also ran a Windows repair for the heck of it but matters only worsened. No more tests. Another bad graphics card, and another card going to back to the seller, unfortunately.

Some just see if POST screen shows, rule it as good and fully working.

Nexxen wrote on 2022-08-25, 20:21:

Meatball wrote on 2022-08-25, 20:16:

This GTX 580 was listed as new and never used. Not only does have video corruption (no matter which DVI or HDMI port is used), but it BSODs Windows whenever its driver is installed, too. I've seen some video corruption cure itself once the card warms up, but not this one. I also ran a Windows repair for the heck of it but matters only worsened. No more tests. Another bad graphics card, and another card going to back to the seller, unfortunately.

Some just see if POST screen shows, rules it as good and fully working.

Yep; the same was done (I presume) with a bad Ti4800SE I recently posted bad, but this 580 has the lines even at POST, so they didn't go even that far.

What I'm thinking is a number of people buying old hardware don't even test on arrival, or they wait months to test or try to fix until outside the window of reasonable return. So, sellers can get away with doing nothing if the buyer is not testing right away or trying to avoid the hassle of return and end up fixing the hardware (or if unlucky tossing it in the loss pile).

Scored a bunch of 512MB EEC reg SDRAM sticks (8 of them in unopened boxes).
So I spent the last few days running memtest om my Intel i440GX+.
Takes about 4 hours running one pass with 4 sticks, no errors found.
Not even sure if Memtest86 4.3.7 will show errors with ECC memory 🤣 =)

Meatball wrote on 2022-08-25, 20:16:

This GTX 580 was listed as new and never used. Not only does have video corruption (no matter which DVI or HDMI port is used), but it BSODs Windows whenever its driver is installed, too. I've seen some video corruption cure itself once the card warms up, but not this one. I also ran a Windows repair for the heck of it but matters only worsened. No more tests. Another bad graphics card, and another card going to back to the seller, unfortunately.

These nasty NOvideo GTX Thermi, they like to do this kind of crap, or being totally dead... I did purchase PNY GTX 480 it have the exact same type of shit on the screen. But i will try to recover the card with heat gun.. I did purchase last week an artefacting and crashing without even driver Radeon R9 280x, for the sake of getting the fans, since i had the exact same model (VaporX), but mine did have broken fans, so i did buy the card only for the fans, since it will be cheaper, then getting new ones. So the card did come as bonus, did not work at all past Windows loading screen, it did enter in OS and crashing... But after 10 minutes of 350c heat gunning, now the crap is all gone Prototype II and GTA V work fine, and the card flawless.. Did fix with heat gun before other cards.. Will try to fix that shitty GTX 480 i did get it along with GEforce 7950 GX2 both for 15 euros, the scumbag seller said they both work, but seems he did lie the fucker... Still i did not pay much for these cards, but still it is so hard for some peasants not to lie maybe jesus....

Will see if the HeatGun will be able to ressurect that crap... How much did u pay for that shitty GTX 580 ?

On other hand the repair of the VaporX went so well, the card is 110% functional now. I dont think it will be short fix, since i know that this kind of artifacts are caused by bad solder joints on memory, meanwhile when the GPU is bad, nothing is visible...

These artifacts look like some of the old NES 8 bit games 🤣 ...

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-26, 20:51:

These nasty NOvideo GTX Thermi, they like to do this kind of crap, or being totally dead... I did purchase PNY GTX 480 it have t […]
Show full quote

Meatball wrote on 2022-08-25, 20:16:

This GTX 580 was listed as new and never used. Not only does have video corruption (no matter which DVI or HDMI port is used), but it BSODs Windows whenever its driver is installed, too. I've seen some video corruption cure itself once the card warms up, but not this one. I also ran a Windows repair for the heck of it but matters only worsened. No more tests. Another bad graphics card, and another card going to back to the seller, unfortunately.

These nasty NOvideo GTX Thermi, they like to do this kind of crap, or being totally dead... I did purchase PNY GTX 480 it have the exact same type of shit on the screen. But i will try to recover the card with heat gun.. I did purchase last week an artefacting and crashing without even driver Radeon R9 280x, for the sake of getting the fans, since i had the exact same model (VaporX), but mine did have broken fans, so i did buy the card only for the fans, since it will be cheaper, then getting new ones. So the card did come as bonus, did not work at all past Windows loading screen, it did enter in OS and crashing... But after 10 minutes of 350c heat gunning, now the crap is all gone Prototype II and GTA V work fine, and the card flawless.. Did fix with heat gun before other cards.. Will try to fix that shitty GTX 480 i did get it along with GEforce 7950 GX2 both for 15 euros, the scumbag seller said they both work, but seems he did lie the fucker... Still i did not pay much for these cards, but still it is so hard for some peasants not to lie maybe jesus....

Will see if the HeatGun will be able to ressurect that crap... How much did u pay for that shitty GTX 580 ?

7950 + 480.jpg
20220401_175303.jpg
20220401_175222.jpg

On other hand the repair of the VaporX went so well, the card is 110% functional now. I dont think it will be short fix, since i know that this kind of artifacts are caused by bad solder joints on memory, meanwhile when the GPU is bad, nothing is visible...

These artifacts look like some of the old NES 8 bit games 🤣 ...

20220809_115953.jpg
20220823_214047.jpg

I bought it "new in the box" for $60.

Damn much money for crap.. Locally i buy mostly no warranty at all, since is no ebay. But if is a Voodoo card for dirt cheap like 10 euros and bunch of more stuff why not, most of the time they are just fine. But these newer cards for sure are plagued with these crap rosh compliant, and the newer non lead soldering, results in crap with bad solder joints... They dont make them, as they used to back in the days...

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-26, 22:34:

Damn much money for crap.. Locally i buy mostly no warranty at all, since is no ebay. But if is a Voodoo card for dirt cheap like 10 euros and bunch of more stuff why not, most of the time they are just fine. But these newer cards for sure are plagued with these crap rosh compliant, and the newer non lead soldering, results in crap with bad solder joints... They dont make them, as they used to back in the days...

Yeah, but it's OK. I'll get my money back. If available, I tend to buy items in the box and thus pay more. I also just bought an Asus GTX 680 DirectCU II in the box. Hopefully this GTX turns in better reliability than the last.

I've bought a lot of other video and sound cards recently, plus a few motherboards, but I haven't posted most of the working ones yet since I have been testing them pretty thoroughly. I've had 1 motherboard and 3 video card failures (AOpen AX6F, GTX 580, Rage Mobility-P, and a Permedia 2) out of the lots. No sound card failures.

Meatball wrote on 2022-08-26, 22:44:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-26, 22:34:

Damn much money for crap.. Locally i buy mostly no warranty at all, since is no ebay. But if is a Voodoo card for dirt cheap like 10 euros and bunch of more stuff why not, most of the time they are just fine. But these newer cards for sure are plagued with these crap rosh compliant, and the newer non lead soldering, results in crap with bad solder joints... They dont make them, as they used to back in the days...

Yeah, but it's OK. I'll get my money back. If available, I tend to buy items in the box and thus pay more. I also just bought an Asus GTX 680 DirectCU II in the box. Hopefully this GTX turns in better reliability than the last.

I've bought a lot of other video and sound cards recently, plus a few motherboards, but I haven't posted most of the working ones yet since I have been testing them pretty thoroughly. I've had 1 motherboard and 3 video card failures (AOpen AX6F, GTX 580, Rage Mobility-P, and a Permedia 2) out of the lots. No sound card failures.

Well everyone likes to buy the stuff as they was sold back when new, sadly most of the time, we are happy if the thing is in mint condition and working, even an disk or manual makes me happy... Sadly no one did think to preserve their 3Dfx boxes, never saw any... Best i could find in the wild here was 2 times Voodoo III original disk, never manuals or boxes tho... Sadly most nVIDIA cards turn 80% of the time into shit, since they seems to die and have problems, alot more then their Radeon counterparts...

Yeah saw that u post all the time here 🤣, guess u did dump alot of money on ebay for everything.. Is interesting is AOpen, these boards are very well build, but every electronic part can die ofc, that board is very strange tho, is slot 1, but with EDO slots and x3 chipsets like on Pentium Pro so is prob. Intel 440FX series...

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-27, 07:39:

Meatball wrote on 2022-08-26, 22:44:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-26, 22:34:

Damn much money for crap.. Locally i buy mostly no warranty at all, since is no ebay. But if is a Voodoo card for dirt cheap like 10 euros and bunch of more stuff why not, most of the time they are just fine. But these newer cards for sure are plagued with these crap rosh compliant, and the newer non lead soldering, results in crap with bad solder joints... They dont make them, as they used to back in the days...

Yeah, but it's OK. I'll get my money back. If available, I tend to buy items in the box and thus pay more. I also just bought an Asus GTX 680 DirectCU II in the box. Hopefully this GTX turns in better reliability than the last.

I've bought a lot of other video and sound cards recently, plus a few motherboards, but I haven't posted most of the working ones yet since I have been testing them pretty thoroughly. I've had 1 motherboard and 3 video card failures (AOpen AX6F, GTX 580, Rage Mobility-P, and a Permedia 2) out of the lots. No sound card failures.

Well everyone likes to buy the stuff as they was sold back when new, sadly most of the time, we are happy if the thing is in mint condition and working, even an disk or manual makes me happy... Sadly no one did think to preserve their 3Dfx boxes, never saw any... Best i could find in the wild here was 2 times Voodoo III original disk, never manuals or boxes tho... Sadly most nVIDIA cards turn 80% of the time into shit, since they seems to die and have problems, alot more then their Radeon counterparts...

Yeah saw that u post all the time here 🤣, guess u did dump alot of money on ebay for everything.. Is interesting is AOpen, these boards are very well build, but every electronic part can die ofc, that board is very strange tho, is slot 1, but with EDO slots and x3 chipsets like on Pentium Pro so is prob. Intel 440FX series...

Yes, the AOpen is 440FX. With the original BIOS, it would POST but lockup after 15-30 seconds. I tried another chip with the latest BIOS, but then it wouldn't boot at all. I might try once more with an earlier BIOS revision. I'm sure someone around here could probably identify and fix the problem with little effort.

As far as video cards, I've experienced a roughly equal number of failures between NVidia and ATI - but all of them were from used cards - I never had one I bought 1st hand breakdown. Since you've worked out of a shop, you're operating at a macro level, while I'm on the micro level. I believe everyone around here when they say which models of different eras have issues.

Today I finished almost completely restoring a Philips CD-I 210 that I got from eBay recently.

I removed the disc drive and it's tray to get access to the belt and the gears. I removed the gears, cleaned and then applied some grease. Next I fitted the new replacement belt and reassembled the drive fully back into the case. The drive tray now opens and closes perfectly, smooth and quiet also.

For the finishing touches, I simply cleaned the case with soap & water and got it looking pretty presentable now:

So I've also been trying out some games today, to ensure everything is still all working good.

I've still got work to do on it at some point to replace the dead timekeeper battery. I'm not in a hurry to do this though and I'll probably practice some chip cutting techniques on an old dead Dallas chip first before I even think about cutting open the timekeeper chip to mount a CR2032 holder.

I managed to repair the EVGA GeForce 6800GT AGP that I acquired from fellower VOGONr @CJ_reha 6 years ago. I had bought it with the understanding the VGA port had an RGB channel dead but unfortunately USPS did what they do best and beat the crap out of it during shipping, knocking off a cap and apparently causing at least one cold solder joint either in the BGA or in the resistors on the back of the card that was causing artifacting on BIOS. Basically I stripped the cooler off, cleaned it with isopropyl alchohol and a toothbrush, then ran my heatgun at 480 degrees with low air over the NV40 chip (8 minutes) and the BGA RAM chips (30 seconds per chip) then bumped the air flow up to medium and slowly reflowed the entire back of the card along with the rear front portion where the VRMs are. I let it cool down and sure enough the artifacts were gone, and now it renders perfectly after reassembling the cooler with new thermal paste. VGA port is still messed up but DVI to VGA works fine and I don't foresee myself ever running dual monitors on this (realistically I would never use a card this valuable/fragile for anything other than benchmarking, seeing as how ludites have inflated the price of EVGA 6800GTs to $125+ now)

Not the cleanest SMD soldering job but it seems to be electrically functional. Didn't help I accidentally ordered a 8mm cap instead of a 10mm cap.

Tested it out with the classic Nalu tech demo. Seems to be working fine.

Also ran 3DMark2005 for good measure. Scores seem to be on par, didn't notice any issues.

Kinda wish I hadn't sold my giant box of dead GPUs from 2004-2011 last year, now that it seems there is a high likelyhood I could have gotten some of them going with my heat gun and newfound proficiency in soldering.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-29, 01:06:

I managed to repair the EVGA GeForce 6800GT AGP that I acquired from fellower VOGONr @CJ_reha 6 years ago. I had bought it with […]
Show full quote

I managed to repair the EVGA GeForce 6800GT AGP that I acquired from fellower VOGONr @CJ_reha 6 years ago. I had bought it with the understanding the VGA port had an RGB channel dead but unfortunately USPS did what they do best and beat the crap out of it during shipping, knocking off a cap and apparently causing at least one cold solder joint either in the BGA or in the resistors on the back of the card that was causing artifacting on BIOS. Basically I stripped the cooler off, cleaned it with isopropyl alchohol and a toothbrush, then ran my heatgun at 480 degrees with low air over the NV40 chip (8 minutes) and the BGA RAM chips (30 seconds per chip) then bumped the air flow up to medium and slowly reflowed the entire back of the card along with the rear front portion where the VRMs are. I let it cool down and sure enough the artifacts were gone, and now it renders perfectly after reassembling the cooler with new thermal paste. VGA port is still messed up but DVI to VGA works fine and I don't foresee myself ever running dual monitors on this (realistically I would never use a card this valuable/fragile for anything other than benchmarking, seeing as how ludites have inflated the price of EVGA 6800GTs to $125+ now)

Not the cleanest SMD soldering job but it seems to be electrically functional. Didn't help I accidentally ordered a 8mm cap instead of a 10mm cap.

Tested it out with the classic Nalu tech demo. Seems to be working fine.

Also ran 3DMark2005 for good measure. Scores seem to be on par, didn't notice any issues.

Kinda wish I hadn't sold my giant box of dead GPUs from 2004-2011 last year, now that it seems there is a high likelihood, I could have gotten some of them going with my heat gun and newfound proficiency in soldering.

Luddites... there's a word I don't see often enough.

Nice work!

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-29, 01:06:

I managed to repair the EVGA GeForce 6800GT AGP that I acquired from fellower VOGONr @CJ_reha 6 years ago. I had bought it with […]
Show full quote

I managed to repair the EVGA GeForce 6800GT AGP that I acquired from fellower VOGONr @CJ_reha 6 years ago. I had bought it with the understanding the VGA port had an RGB channel dead but unfortunately USPS did what they do best and beat the crap out of it during shipping, knocking off a cap and apparently causing at least one cold solder joint either in the BGA or in the resistors on the back of the card that was causing artifacting on BIOS. Basically I stripped the cooler off, cleaned it with isopropyl alchohol and a toothbrush, then ran my heatgun at 480 degrees with low air over the NV40 chip (8 minutes) and the BGA RAM chips (30 seconds per chip) then bumped the air flow up to medium and slowly reflowed the entire back of the card along with the rear front portion where the VRMs are. I let it cool down and sure enough the artifacts were gone, and now it renders perfectly after reassembling the cooler with new thermal paste. VGA port is still messed up but DVI to VGA works fine and I don't foresee myself ever running dual monitors on this (realistically I would never use a card this valuable/fragile for anything other than benchmarking, seeing as how ludites have inflated the price of EVGA 6800GTs to $125+ now)

Not the cleanest SMD soldering job but it seems to be electrically functional. Didn't help I accidentally ordered a 8mm cap instead of a 10mm cap.

Tested it out with the classic Nalu tech demo. Seems to be working fine.

Also ran 3DMark2005 for good measure. Scores seem to be on par, didn't notice any issues.

Kinda wish I hadn't sold my giant box of dead GPUs from 2004-2011 last year, now that it seems there is a high likelyhood I could have gotten some of them going with my heat gun and newfound proficiency in soldering.

Weirdly I got three 6800GT AGP cards recently for 125 USD for the lot, all three work perfectly and dont appear to have ever had much use, disassembly of the fan unit revealed almost no dust or any indication of the cards having been in constant use.

Thought I was only buying one but got all three, Wonder how they would go in SLI.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-29, 01:56:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-29, 01:06:

I managed to repair the EVGA GeForce 6800GT AGP that I acquired from fellower VOGONr @CJ_reha 6 years ago. I had bought it with […]
Show full quote

I managed to repair the EVGA GeForce 6800GT AGP that I acquired from fellower VOGONr @CJ_reha 6 years ago. I had bought it with the understanding the VGA port had an RGB channel dead but unfortunately USPS did what they do best and beat the crap out of it during shipping, knocking off a cap and apparently causing at least one cold solder joint either in the BGA or in the resistors on the back of the card that was causing artifacting on BIOS. Basically I stripped the cooler off, cleaned it with isopropyl alchohol and a toothbrush, then ran my heatgun at 480 degrees with low air over the NV40 chip (8 minutes) and the BGA RAM chips (30 seconds per chip) then bumped the air flow up to medium and slowly reflowed the entire back of the card along with the rear front portion where the VRMs are. I let it cool down and sure enough the artifacts were gone, and now it renders perfectly after reassembling the cooler with new thermal paste. VGA port is still messed up but DVI to VGA works fine and I don't foresee myself ever running dual monitors on this (realistically I would never use a card this valuable/fragile for anything other than benchmarking, seeing as how ludites have inflated the price of EVGA 6800GTs to $125+ now)

Not the cleanest SMD soldering job but it seems to be electrically functional. Didn't help I accidentally ordered a 8mm cap instead of a 10mm cap.

Tested it out with the classic Nalu tech demo. Seems to be working fine.

Also ran 3DMark2005 for good measure. Scores seem to be on par, didn't notice any issues.

Kinda wish I hadn't sold my giant box of dead GPUs from 2004-2011 last year, now that it seems there is a high likelyhood I could have gotten some of them going with my heat gun and newfound proficiency in soldering.

Weirdly I got three 6800GT AGP cards recently for 125 USD for the lot, all three work perfectly and dont appear to have ever had much use, disassembly of the fan unit revealed almost no dust or any indication of the cards having been in constant use.

Thought I was only buying one but got all three, Wonder how they would go in SLI.

SLI over AGP.... not really a thing but thats a good deal for 3 6800GT AGPs. Sometimes eBay sellers just want to clear inventory. Sometimes I bookmark something overpriced and come back a month or two later and low ball them. You'd be amazed how often it works.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-29, 04:02:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-29, 01:56:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-08-29, 01:06:

I managed to repair the EVGA GeForce 6800GT AGP that I acquired from fellower VOGONr @CJ_reha 6 years ago. I had bought it with […]
Show full quote

I managed to repair the EVGA GeForce 6800GT AGP that I acquired from fellower VOGONr @CJ_reha 6 years ago. I had bought it with the understanding the VGA port had an RGB channel dead but unfortunately USPS did what they do best and beat the crap out of it during shipping, knocking off a cap and apparently causing at least one cold solder joint either in the BGA or in the resistors on the back of the card that was causing artifacting on BIOS. Basically I stripped the cooler off, cleaned it with isopropyl alchohol and a toothbrush, then ran my heatgun at 480 degrees with low air over the NV40 chip (8 minutes) and the BGA RAM chips (30 seconds per chip) then bumped the air flow up to medium and slowly reflowed the entire back of the card along with the rear front portion where the VRMs are. I let it cool down and sure enough the artifacts were gone, and now it renders perfectly after reassembling the cooler with new thermal paste. VGA port is still messed up but DVI to VGA works fine and I don't foresee myself ever running dual monitors on this (realistically I would never use a card this valuable/fragile for anything other than benchmarking, seeing as how ludites have inflated the price of EVGA 6800GTs to $125+ now)

Not the cleanest SMD soldering job but it seems to be electrically functional. Didn't help I accidentally ordered a 8mm cap instead of a 10mm cap.

Tested it out with the classic Nalu tech demo. Seems to be working fine.

Also ran 3DMark2005 for good measure. Scores seem to be on par, didn't notice any issues.

Kinda wish I hadn't sold my giant box of dead GPUs from 2004-2011 last year, now that it seems there is a high likelyhood I could have gotten some of them going with my heat gun and newfound proficiency in soldering.

Weirdly I got three 6800GT AGP cards recently for 125 USD for the lot, all three work perfectly and dont appear to have ever had much use, disassembly of the fan unit revealed almost no dust or any indication of the cards having been in constant use.

Thought I was only buying one but got all three, Wonder how they would go in SLI.

SLI over AGP.... not really a thing but thats a good deal for 3 6800GT AGPs. Sometimes eBay sellers just want to clear inventory. Sometimes I bookmark something overpriced and come back a month or two later and low ball them. You'd be amazed how often it works.

heh yup on the SLI but Im still curious since they also come in PCIe, IIRC they should be the first SLI capable cards from nVidia that needed to physically linked via SLI bridge. (IIRC 6600GT could do SLI but it was via software rather than hardware link and was terrible)

I dont have any PCIe 6800gt cards but might be interesting to grab one to see what the performance difference is between AGP 8x and PCIe, the PCIe version should be significantly cheaper to acquire.

As for lowballing offers .. yes, thats how I got my NIB complete Audigy 2 ZS platinum for a song, seller had had it listed for 4 months and had been slowly lowering the price so I threw an offer at them 150 USD below what they had it listed for and they took it.

Today I am installing MS-DOS 5.0(a) on the 486DX2/66, very pleased that I found a nice clean desktop style case to hold all the retro componentry.

Did a couple of small but worthwhile and cheap upgrades to my 166MMX I recently got from eBay:

https://youtu.be/zE1QB-nH828

LewisRaz wrote on 2022-08-29, 09:37:

Did a couple of small but worthwhile and cheap upgrades to my 166MMX I recently got from eBay:

https://youtu.be/zE1QB-nH828

Nothing like a good bequiet screwdriver.

Unless I’m mistaken but be quiet gives an identical one with their dark rock pro coolers.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-29, 10:58:

LewisRaz wrote on 2022-08-29, 09:37:

Did a couple of small but worthwhile and cheap upgrades to my 166MMX I recently got from eBay:

https://youtu.be/zE1QB-nH828

Nothing like a good bequiet screwdriver.

Unless I’m mistaken but be quiet gives an identical one with their dark rock pro coolers.

That is where came from!

Best screwdriver I have for PC work.

SCSI drives. AGAIN.