VOGONS


Reply 20 of 26, by shamino

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Wow. I wonder if that was epoxied.
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I agree with Warlord, the card you found is an original Geforce3 board (before the Ti versions came out). The board layout is identical to mine, which is an early GF3 with an "engineering sample" message on the POST screen.
Yours is the same, but it has a DVI port and heatsinks on the RAM, and slightly later BIOS version and chips.
It's definitely a good card.

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Interesting that yours uses a different style of inductor at upper left, while both mine in that area are the same (with the winding exposed). I don't know much about inductors, but I wonder if yours shields noise from the VGA output?

Reply 21 of 26, by analog_programmer

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Yes, you've successfully destroyed the chip beyond all repairs.

Just wondering, for what reason and how did you manage to split this GPU into two halves? Why the hell it was necessary to remove its heatsink? Right now I'm trying to repair a defective TNT2 card and its heatsink is messing with my work and it is also very well factory glued to the GPU. nVidia's insane engineering decisions of the time...

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Reply 22 of 26, by iraito

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analog_programmer wrote on 2023-07-02, 06:46:

Yes, you've successfully destroyed the chip beyond all repairs.

Just wondering, for what reason and how did you manage to split this GPU into two halves? Why the hell it was necessary to remove its heatsink? Right now I'm trying to repair a defective TNT2 card and its heatsink is messing with my work and it is also very well factory glued to the GPU. nVidia's insane engineering decisions of the time...

I think they loved to make things impossible to repair at the time, I was speechless when I opened an Amiga PSU and found it bricked in resin.

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Reply 23 of 26, by Joseph_Joestar

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In cases where strong adhesive was used for the GPU or memory heatsinks, I had the most success by gently sliding a long, very thin blade (e.g. from box cutter) under the heatsink and slowly cutting away the glue. This has to be done very carefully, as to not damage the chip underneath.

And yeah, I doubt the manufacturer ever intended for such things to be serviced, especially on cheaper products.

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Reply 25 of 26, by The Serpent Rider

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Classic GeForce 3 and Ti 500 are easy to identify by inductor placement.

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