Reply 17100 of 52907, by TheAbandonwareGuy
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- Oldbie
wrote:Bought myself a rather special GeForce 7950 GT card. […]
Bought myself a rather special GeForce 7950 GT card.
Seller's photo:
What makes this special is I researched and confirmed the model # (and seller confirmed it on the sticker): this is XFX's "XXX" edition 512MB 7950 GT. The fastest stock-clocked 7950 GT that was made. Comes with stock clocks of 610 Mhz core / 1600 Mhz ram. nVidia reference clocks for the 7950 GT are 550 core / 1400 ram.
And the reason I bought this instead of a 7800 GTX? because almost all of the 7800 & 7900 GTX models are OEM's out of dell or something and they all seem to be not working in ebay, or the ones that are listed as used and not "as-is", are bulk sellers that just strip down 100 machines and stick em on ebay without testing to see if they work. I've messaged multiple sellers with "used" OEM-Looking 7800 GTX's and 7900 GTX's and they all write back "No testing performed, 30 day return warranty though!" just dun wanna screw with it. Also they want like $35 and up for 7800/7900's that may or may not work. This is almost 7900 GTX clocks, and faster than the 7800 GTX *just slightly*, and the seller confirmed to me in ebay messages he both tested it works and tried installing drivers and tested it in aquamark3d and said it passed and has no issues. Plus seller accepted my offer of $20, free shipping.
So after buying 6 different 7800 GTX series quadro cards from 6 different sellers over the course of 2016 and into 2017, fingers crossed I can finally get a working high-end 7000 series card. I do plan to find a way to mount a fan on this thing though. I may even try to see if I can mount one of these big heatpipe coolers off one of my dead 7800GTX-Quadro cards on it too if the holes line up. Might have to splice wires with the cables and fan connectors to get the fan to work with the power connector on this card to power it though. We'll see.. either way, I'm not running this thing fanless.
Main reason I want this card is to try slightly later modified drivers and see if I can get this to work in my 5-Ghz Pentium4 Windows98 PCI-E machine.
Supposedly from some old information I've found online, XFX basically "cherry picked" or "binned" the gpu chips for their XXX line, the best ones out of the lot, and as a result I'm hoping that will mean it's survived the years of "bumpgate" nvidia issues that killed almost 90% of the 7000-family of cards by 2017.
First off, can someone explain to me what bump gate is?
Second, to be fair, the Dell 7800GTXs were fairly well designed and there's a good chance they will work. You don't realize how absurdly beefy the cooler on those OEM 7800s are until you own one. Here's a picture taken in a way that should reveal this:
That's a large fan full coverage (in that it appears to cover the core, memory on both sides, and the power circuitry) cooler that's actually probably overkill for the task. 4 large heatpipes vent to additional cooling blocks at the front and rear. This Quadro is dead but I suspect a non-heat related issue. That's the same cooler Dell put on there 7800's. I've owned a 7800 (I need to post about that not so hilarious experience sometime) from EVGA that used the reference design and as far as cooling goes if I ever get a working 7800 (planned, but not budgeted atm) and the qaudro isn't revived by a bake I may very well put this cooler on it. It's a very good design. Proof there are at least a few brain cells rubbing together at whichever company designed this cooler.
Anywho, the BFG 7800GS OC AGP I had been working on is still dead and what's worse is I just discovered the RAM slots were preventing full insertion at first meaning it may have been working when I got it and my last ditch effort shower to clean the card may have killed it. That being said I think it was dead when I received as the cooler was full of black gunk and being a factory OC model the heat load with a blocked cooler must have been extreme. Does anyone want to suggest what temperature I should bake it at? I'm thinking 400F but I'm worried about the plastics on these older surface mount caps.
Another thought to recently cross my mind. My last lot of cards were packed in only bubble wrap. How bad is bubble wrap in terms of ESD? I almost wonder if it contributed to the 8/10 failure rate of that lot.
Cyb3rst0rms Retro Hardware Warzone: https://discord.gg/jK8uvR4c
I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction