Edit: Major problem. I am not joking - the card caught fire. The flame was about 1 inch square, and lasted for about 2 seconds. See photo, top right - it's right next to the "bad" capacitor. BTW, the mobo/PSU seems to have survived!

Guess you should have replaced that damaged capacitor...

retro are you in the u.k ?
in the classified of of a mag i read computer mart there is a 5900xt for sale £10
i'll post details if your interested

Davros, yes I am but I'm now having second thoughts about the 59xx series. This "fried" one, and the one I tested before it (a Gigabyte 5950) both make "funny hissing noises", which makes me just want to use my silent 128-bit fx5200 instead! This hissing sound seems to be something to do with the onboard power stuff, and not the fan(s). Thanks a lot for the offer anyway! 😀

GF5 is junk. Do you have a GF3/4 in the infinite treasure hold yet?

I had a 5900XT and it hissed too. They are power hungry but have cheap power circuitry.

The "infinite treasure hold" is beginning to burst at the seams! The earliest nVidia card I have is a Geforce MX 440 AGP x8 card (VGA/DVI), which is passively cooled. I appreciate that it's about a "middle of the range" series 4 card. I don't mind that it's not the fastest series 4 card. I quite like my FX5200 card! Granted, it will have poor AA + other "power stuff" performance, but it's older VESA stuff is OK!

I just retested an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro card, and it doesn't make too much noise. I think I'm going to skip the faster nVidia 5950 & 6800 cards, and stick with the ATI card. I appreciate they are slower and also have no VESA 2 (and 3?) support, but that's where the FX5200 can help out..

Details sent via pm...

Oh no. 😐

GF4MX 440 isn't a member of the GF4Ti series............ how can you live with yourself knowing you don't have NV20 or NV25!? 🙄 🙄 😁

I had a BFG 5900XT die on me too after about a year or two, no idea why. BFG was nice enough to send me 6600GT in it's place, which was much faster.

Oh no! 😦 So, it looks like I need to try either a GF3 or GF4. Which one is best? Do any exist without a fan, and also provide a sharp image, not blurry? (I seem to recall a discussion about an early GF card that had a blurry general image quality.)

BTW, I just realised I have some TNT cards, and also a Riva128.

I remember going to PC World and seeing all these Geforce cards for sale over the years, and each time thinking "better stick with my orchid righteous card", cos I couldn't afford to upgrade! So all this stuff just passed me by, back in the day. Still it's good fun now, cos it's all "cheap as chips" on ebay! 😀

GF4Ti is just an improved GF3 so it's the way to go.

Unfortunately you are probably not going to find one without a fan. This was the era of cheap shitty heatsink fan combos with fans that almost always died. You can attach something like the Arctic Cooling Accelero S2 however, as I did with my GF3. I wouldn't bother unless you get something with a dead or dying noisy spinner-o-pain.

retro games 100 wrote:

Oh no! 😦 So, it looks like I need to try either a GF3 or GF4. Which one is best? Do any exist without a fan, and also provide a sharp image, not blurry? (I seem to recall a discussion about an early GF card that had a blurry general image quality.)

I don't know who started the blurriness GF post, they must of had a few caps busted on the card as I've never had any issues with a GF2, GF3, GF5, GF6, GF7, GF8 cards, my GTX 260 or even old TNT/TNT2 cards.

I did have a 19" Samsung that slowly lost focus and got blurry, it wasn't my video card. It all went a way with a new monitor.

Also I run a fanless GF 5200 in my server, looks sharp but 3d is lacking big time.

bushwack wrote:

..never had any issues with a GF2, GF3....

It really depends on who built the card and whether they cared about doing quality work. The bad blurry cards annoyed enough people to cause some of them to come up with guides to modify the post-DAC analog circuitry to clean things up a bit.

The generations with the most potential for blur are pre-GF4. I have definitely seen a few really bad GeForce cards, but some with very nice quality too. The NV blur issue isn't really any different than with many older cards of the '90s that cut costs on cheaper cards by considering what monitors they were likely be used with. Older NVIDIA game cards typically were used with 15-19" monitors, so 1024x768-1280x960 and around 75Hz probably.

swaaye wrote:

The NV blur issue isn't really any different than with many older cards of the '90s that simply weren't designed for high resolutions. With TNT through GF3, 17" monitors were probably the main target and that's typically only 1152x864 75Hz or so.

My eyes! MY EYES!

I always preferred 1024x768 85hz over higher rez at lower refresh. The flicker at 75hz drives me nuts.

I've modified several TNT and early Geforce cards in a similar way to what is described in that link, although I do not recommend shorting the inductors. Just removing the filter capacitors is enough to clean up the image quality significantly (how significantly depends on the card).

As a matter of fact, I still have one of my modified Geforce2 cards in use, running at 1600x1200, and it looks as clear as any modern card.

I had a look at this interesting webpage on wikipedia -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nv … rocessing_units

It shows all the different nVidia chipsets, over the years. For the GF4 series, I'm tempted to get a Ti4200 AGP 8X, because the ones I've seen on ebay have DVI, but it looks like they use the NV28 chipset and not NV25. Is this a bad idea?

The difference between NV28 and NV25 is pretty much just AGP 8X support on the former... there's not any functional difference between the two.

I just spotted this interesting looking ti4200 for sale -

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … e=STRK:MEWAX:IT

It's a curious looking thing, as its design takes up 2 slots. The seller has got 84 of them left. Go for it, or avoid?

retro games 100 wrote:

I just spotted this interesting looking ti4200 for sale -

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … e=STRK:MEWAX:IT

It's a curious looking thing, as its design takes up 2 slots. The seller has got 84 of them left. Go for it, or avoid?

The cooling solution on these models is very noisy.
Same noisy cooling they had on their king of s478 boards..the Abit IC7 Max3