Is that really the only option?

Are you sure that the memory chips on the geforce 256 are bad? Could you harvest parts from a much less rare card (like maybe a geforce 2 mx) instead?

Personally I wouldn't. You're destroying the first Radeon card ever released, to save a Quadro.
If you can find the 6ns chips 9n the future, it's not destroying of course, it's a kind of lending. 😉

And if you're going to sell it, you're obligated to mention it's repaired.

I could harvest ram from anything with hy5dv651622 tc-g6 and I assume hy5dv651622 tc-G55. There are 4 chips on the front and 4 on the back. Squeze testing reveals nothing. The artifacts look memory related in my opinion. As I see lines or stripes in the output the card does display however.

Its not just any quadro. Even though saying its a quadro sounds bad. Its this card picture I borrowed from VGA Legacy MKIII Becasue its a AGP pro card its 100 times more rare than a normal one. If I wanted another its impossible however if I wanted another radeon 7200 its pretty easy.

To put into perspective I could harvest two Matrox G450s That would probably cost me 50-60 Dollars after shipping. Or I could harvest a 7200 that would cost me about the same going by current ebay prices.

It's a great card indeed. I would only sacrifice a Radeon as last resort.
From my experience, Radeons are not that rare. They just tend to be less accurately described in online ads. So hard to find. I have 2 or 3 of them and never paid more than 15/20€ for it.

Have you tried to buy the chips directly ?

https://www.utsource.net/itm/p/4497096.html

No way.

I'd see about those G450s - common as muck.

g450s it is then.