First post, by watson
Hi, this is my first post on VOGONS and already quite a downer, but here goes.
Last week on a local Craigslist equivalent I stumbled upon a GeForce 256 DDR from the title for around €7. I bought it together with a GeForce 6600 AGP from the same seller for a combined €15 with shipping.
Both GPUs were listed as working. However, the idiot packed them in one sheet of paper stacked right on top of each other and put it all in a regular envelope.
When the packaged arrived and I saw what it was, I was fuming. Of course, inside the envelope were the two cards and about two and a half SMD capacitors rattling around.
Upon further inspection, it became clear that someone had already tampered with the Erazor. Fan wires were spliced together and the N-channel MOSFET that controls the fan had two of its pads ripped off and it was soldered back completely wrong (there are also pads for a through-hole version of the MOSFET, and both gate and drain were soldered to the SAME pad).
Therefore, the fan wasn't spinning at all. Thankfully, it was possible to resolder the MOSFET correctly and that (combined with a bit of oil) was enough to bring the fan back to life.
However, that was not the cause of the main issue. The symptoms are those of heavy memory corruption, photos of which can be seen here: https://imgur.com/a/GJ0Sx
There was a missing SMD electrolytic on the front which I replaced, but it didn't fix the issue.
There was also a missing SMD ceramic on the back near one of the RAM ICs (visible in the photos). Of course, I didn't know the value so I desoldered a cap near another RAM chip which (I guessed) had the same functionality.
It turned out to be a 1nF cap, so I replaced the broken one with the same value. Nothing changed. These are both probably decoupling caps (because they are connected to ground on one side) so I presume their presence doesn't make much of a difference anyway.
The last thing I tried to do was reheating the solder joints on the all the RAM ICs on the back. This was hard to do with a €10 LIDL iron and took quite a while, but it is possible (with the help of some solder wick here and there). Once again, nothing changed.
I did manage to boot into Windows XP once and installed the driver, but device manager just showed a Code 10 (This device cannot start), which is to be expected. After that, it just BSODs at the XP loading bar.
At this point you might be thinking that I don't have a clue what I'm doing and that I'm going to eventually kill the card and I mostly agree with you.
It is possible that the RAM is simply bad. It is also possible that the GPU is dead from overheating beacuse it presumably ran without a fan for a long time (and it gets hot very quickly without it).
I would like to know if there is anything I could possibly do to bring this card back to life because it is a piece of history and I don't think I'll ever have to opportunity to buy another.
I'm thinking of just throwing it in the trash and forgetting it ever happened. This has pissed me off so much that I think I won't be buying "retro" hardware (i.e. junk) ever again.
BTW, the 6600 was missing 2 caps near the core and 1 near the RAM. Since there is no possible way to know the values (unless I had another exact same card, good luck with that) I randomly replaced them with 100nF ceramics. There is just a black screen on boot, nothing happens.
