MattRocks wrote on Today, 19:18:

Thank you. It feels like not worth repairing (or even using) GeForce6/7/8 cards as their breakage is just.. inevitable.

If you keep the die temperature under control and select GPU revisions that produce less heat, you can mitigate thermal fatigue quite a bit.

The good news is that the video card works! It's currently crushing 3dmark 2000 in a different system with scores over 14,000.

It's in a different system because I'm not sure about the Via motherboard. It might not be stable. Crashed when I tried to put in a USB drive. But maybe it's because it is running a hacked up version of windows XP with a custom shell that wants to vpn into fullswinggolf.com. So it is a golf simulator.

The hard drive is kind of curious. WD WD800JD Caviar SE 80 GB SATA hard drive. That's one of those early SATA 1 drives that has both the legacy 4 pin molex and the sata power connectors.

Congrats on your find! If a 6800GT doesn't POST, is it basically wall art?

MattRocks wrote on Today, 20:13:

The Radeons in my collection are holding up better. I have more failures in X1000 era, but I figured that was due to insufficient cooling on the Rialto?

That's another possible failure point as well.

MattRocks wrote on Today, 21:37:

Congrats on your find! If a 6800GT doesn't POST, is it basically wall art?

I'd check the capacitors before tossing.