Are you sure the bulging caps are the cause and not another effect?

I would say yes, though I guess it'd depend if you still plan to use it and if its been sufficient for your AGP gaming needs. Even if its a really stripped down model, its a decent AGP card.

AGP cards of that class and faster are getting more valuable as time goes on. When that card was new, they weren't making AGP cards of top tier models (aside from the extremely rare 7950GT AGP), so being a mid range card from that era actually ranks it pretty high on list of good AGP cards. It'll easily outperform (and have more features than) some of the last high end AGP cards, like the Radeon 9800 Pro or Geforce FX 5950.

For me it's a question of:

• Is it still working enough to show that it's a simple repair or am I taking a gamble and possibly wasting my time on something that could be unfeasible to revive?
• Do I have replacement parts in stock, or can I get them at zero cost (e.g. donor boards) or at a reasonable price & time frame?

Since it's not totally dead, if you know your way around recapping PCBs and if you can easily source some caps, I'd say go for it.

I've never done caps, is it harder than fixing traces? I've done traces before.

Its a 7600GS Passive, it works fine in 2d, its when it goes 3d it looks all terrible. It didn't a week ago so I'm guessing the caps failed and made the display go nuts.

But it is a Gigabyte 7600GS AGP 256mb PAssive card. More intended for the HTPC back in 2006 but it's faster than a 6600GT

candle_86 wrote:

I've never done caps, is it harder than fixing traces? I've done traces before.

Its a 7600GS Passive, it works fine in 2d, its when it goes 3d it looks all terrible. It didn't a week ago so I'm guessing the caps failed and made the display go nuts.

But it is a Gigabyte 7600GS AGP 256mb PAssive card. More intended for the HTPC back in 2006 but it's faster than a 6600GT

i know this might sound like a dumb question but have you tried cleaning the card and replacing the thermal paste?
my experience with artifacting is that its usually caused by overheating VRM chips, so maybe it could be a easy fix with some VRM heatsinks, a Fan (since yours has a passive cooler) and new thermal paste

Just do it and it is worth fixing as these Geforce 7 era agp cards don't grow on trees 🤣
If the vrms have been getting hot enough to pop the caps you got bigger problems but from what I have dealt with on these cards the vrms generally don't get that hot.

I bet that you not only need to recap it, but most certainly you will need to reflow the GPU. Usually when i had a card with bad caps it would crash or not work at all. With me 10 ou of 10 : artifacts = bad solder balls under the gpu = reflowing or even better and long lasting, reballing which is quite hard without the right tools.

candle_86 wrote:

Its a 7600GS Passive, it works fine in 2d, its when it goes 3d it looks all terrible. It didn't a week ago so I'm guessing the caps failed and made the display go nuts.

But it is a Gigabyte 7600GS AGP 256mb PAssive card. More intended for the HTPC back in 2006 but it's faster than a 6600GT

rick6 wrote:

I bet that you not only need to recap it, but most certainly you will need to reflow the GPU. Usually when i had a card with bad caps it would crash or not work at all. With me 10 ou of 10 : artifacts = bad solder balls under the gpu = reflowing or even better and long lasting, reballing which is quite hard without the right tools.

Sorry for the res.
I suspect this is indeed the issue.
I've bought 2 7600GS AGP passive cards when they were still new and I had one of the cards run some Unreal 2 and after it clicked and my screen went black (system was still running, but had to do a manual reset), I touched the passive heatsink and it was very hot to the touch.

As I figured it was an overheating problem (my rig had good enough airflow), I kinda shoehorned a 8cm case fan onto it and this problem went away forever (I immediately 'upgraded' my 2nd 7600GS passive AGP in a similar way as soon as I got it, used it in another rig).

This is also the reason why I, despite really liking those originally passively cooled AGP 7600GS's, avoid buying these cards second hand.

Depends on what you use it for I think, if it's for an XP build then probably not worth it, as there are many other cheap alternatives today. But if you're pushing a Win98 system with unofficial drivers and you can't find a 7800 GS then that's another story.

I have the 7800GS and had to replace the fan but not sure what state it is in right now, "bad solder" would ring in my ears everytime I read someone mention that card.

archsan wrote:

Depends on what you use it for I think, if it's for an XP build then probably not worth it, as there are many other cheap alternatives today. But if you're pushing a Win98 system with unofficial drivers and you can't find a 7800 GS then that's another story.

I have the 7800GS and had to replace the fan but not sure what state it is in right now, "bad solder" would ring in my ears everytime I read someone mention that card.

OP should just keep it if he hasn't fixed it yet (easy job really) as these Geforce 7 era agp cards are likely to go up like home prices given how quickly resellers are likely to hike up the prices some day.

nforce4max wrote:

archsan wrote:

Depends on what you use it for I think, if it's for an XP build then probably not worth it, as there are many other cheap alternatives today. But if you're pushing a Win98 system with unofficial drivers and you can't find a 7800 GS then that's another story.

I have the 7800GS and had to replace the fan but not sure what state it is in right now, "bad solder" would ring in my ears everytime I read someone mention that card.

OP should just keep it if he hasn't fixed it yet (easy job really) as these Geforce 7 era agp cards are likely to go up like home prices given how quickly resellers are likely to hike up the prices some day.

I've stuck it in a drawer with my Voodoo 3 2000 PCI, Voodoo Banshee, Geforce 3 Ti 500, and Geforce 4 Ti 4400

nforce4max wrote:

OP should just keep it if he hasn't fixed it yet (easy job really) as these Geforce 7 era agp cards are likely to go up like home prices given how quickly resellers are likely to hike up the prices some day.

Of course he can keep it! 😀 Maybe do the fix in batch along with other cards later on... saves some time. Also I think someone mentioned that the 7900s tend to have more "bad solder" problems than the 7800s, is that true? I forgot the 7900GS comes in AGP too.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/XFX-NVIDIA-GeForce- … g-/152099666975

In the last three years I had maybe 5 or 6 video cards with bad caps, all of which worked fine after a recap. I think that speaks for itself.