vvbee wrote on 2025-04-26, 08:04:
16th subject: ATI Radeon 9600. A history of multiple leaked surface-mount wet alus, covering the board in residue and artefacting the output. All removed and replaced with surface-mount tantalums. The four Nover 470 uF 16 V through-hole wets were replaced with Nichicon UPW.
Works.
The artifacting is almost always a result of a failed GPU chip on these... and that's a direct result of the card being passively cooled and running too hot.
My advice for anyone who has these Radeon 9550/9600 cards with passive coolers: either install a small 40 mm fan directly onto the heatsink or have a large fan blow air on the side of the card. The fans don't have to be blowing at full blast / 12V / max RPM... just move a bit of air across the card. This will dramatically lower the GPU heatsink temperatures. I usually go with the side fan option, as that also tends to cool the RAM too.
As for leaky caps on these cards - have not seen a single one with such. Not faulting you for replacing those Nover caps, though - they are a pretty crappy brand.
Nichicon PW is a little too conservative. The ATI-built cards use Nichicon HC, which is a step-up from the HD series... and HD is a step-up from the HE series, which themselves are a step-up from the PW series. So a better suited series from Nichicon at this point in time (since HC series are no longer made) would be the HW series. HE and HD will do too, of course. PW is more for older half-bridge PSUs (Fortron / Sparkle / SPI / FSP users take note 😉 ).
vvbee wrote on 2025-04-24, 05:40:
14th subject: Nvidia Quadro4 980 XGL. One example of a high-end card not using tantalums, and being worse off for it.
Like with the Radeon 9600 above, I'd say be more worried about the cooling on these cards than the caps. In particular, that small stock heatsink is one reason these cards die. The RAM chips also run pretty hot and should actually use some heatsinks... on both sides of the card.
And again, I have not seen a 980 XGL or a TI4400/4600/4800 with leaky caps - at least not from nVidia itself. IIRC, EVGA used some rather spotty SMT electrolytics that had pretty lousy ESR specs. But the worst was WinFast / Leadtek with some crappy GSC/Evercon caps used for the GPU and RAM output rails. On the positive side, at least they put a nice big cooler and RAM sinks on the card... and probably the reason why my Winfast TI4400 still works without a hitch, but the various stock-cooled TI4400's and 4600's I have are artifacting.
As for the SMT polymers - those are good and probably won't need replacement for the lifetime of the GPU.
Anyways, good work with the rest of the cards / boards.
I myself plan on treating an eVGA Riva TNT2 in a similar way to your cards, but with SMD MLCC's (multi-layer ceramic caps). Basically the card has a lot of small 10 uF 16/25V through-hole electrolytics that are getting in the way of fitting a larger passive cooler. The stock heatsink is a joke and has a super-tiny fan that's extra loud (it's running on full 12V, so yeah.) It's not a card I care that much about (or at all, actually)... but I use it a lot for testing older motherboards with AGP (universal AGP and older). It's particularly annoying after several hours of a board running through stress tests - that tiny cooler on the GPU drives me nuts!