Hello,

I have a V5 5500 AGP card which had some very noisy fans. I wanted to replace them with some nice Noctua ones and while doing that, had this great idea of removing heatsinks, cleaning the chips and using some thermal tape instead. I've put the card to freezer with sealed bags waited an hour and removed the heatsinks very easily. Cleaned up the chips with IPA, along with general cleanup, applied thermal tape and added the original fans back. The card looked dry enough to try (but in hindsight, I guess I should have waited the next day 😀 so I've put it back to the system and it seemed to be fine at first. I did 2 3dMark 2000 default runs, got my usual test results. Wanted to try once more at 1600x1200 resolution, and after a couple seconds on the first test it stopped outputting image. Quickly restarted the PC, but the card never worked again.

So the card is not giving an image output, it's not showing up on the device manager with my onboard GPU, 3dfx flash tool doesn't recognize it, and I can't see it on 3dMark 2001 System Info tool. I removed the fans again and no components on the card, including the VSA chips are heating up even a little bit(which made me suspect the power delivery).

The fans are spinning, but I'm not sure if they are getting their voltage from molex connector or the AGP slot.

The card had some sticky residue on itself(not in a specific area but in general) ever since I bought it but the capacitors look fine from the outside, so it could be from something else. I soaked the card in IPA for a few hours, it fixed the stickiness mostly but the card still not working of course.

Is there anything extra that I can do to figure out the issue? I've ordered a multimeter to at least try something, but not sure where to start. Could freezing the card break the capacitors? I can try to replace them if that's the case, but in case I broke the VSA chips somehow, I'd at least want to keep the card original to frame it or something 😁

Attaching the photos, in case there's something I missed. Thanks!