cyclone3d wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Cleaned the 7800GS OC inside and out. Waiting for it to dry completely before trying it. Some of the screws that held the cooler on were rusted and the cooler was full of this black gunk crap I cannot identify. Not good signs.

I'm going to try the bake trick on the two 8800 and the GTX285. The others aren't worth the trouble/waste of thermal paste or need caps first. At least by the time I'm done with all this I should be a master in GPU repair.

Does anybody here have experience baking GPUs?

Yeah, and it was a bad experience. I tried baking a couple different dead cards and I guess I had the temp up too high because it melted all the plastic bits. The cards weren't really worth anything even if they did work so it wasn't really a loss.

What you really want is a soldering station with a hot air gun. Reflowing using one of those is a piece of cake.

What temperature did you use? I plan on removing the entire cooling assembly and as much plastic as I can. The PCIe connector can take the heat I believe as those should be made of a harder type of plastic.

brassicGamer wrote:

spiroyster wrote:

My first foray into mixing. Listening to drum&bass through those speakers was pretty rough, in fact might as well drop the 'bass' part of the name. Good for beat-matching 😵

There is the very occasional mention of retro music hardware on here. I cut my teeth on a pair of SoundLab DLP-3R belt drives and a crappy Kam mixer. Cash converters jobby. Fortunately I had half decent speakers. And by half decent I mean big but underpowered with low impedance. The impedance set my first amp on fire and the low power led to their own death by fire while the amp laughed like a maniac. I was playing DJ Zinc in the pub last night!

I still have my customised Vestax PMC270A. I last mixed with it when I sold my 1210's in 2006 🙁, but didn't have the heart to get rid of my mixer 😀 It has been used for multi-channel input's into various systems over the years. Sold all my vinyl when Serato Final Scratch came out... and then bloated out my catalogs with complete label release catalogs of choons (got quite OCD about collecting releases based on their catalog number... as a result got loads of full catalogs from most of the techstep/neurofunk labels up until about 2007 ish...when it started going a bit shit imo... 😲 ).... thinking I need to change this situation really, as I have most of a lifetimes supply of music ... a lot of which I haven't even listened too, just got it because of its catalog number o.0 ....

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Cleaned the 7800GS OC inside and out. Waiting for it to dry completely before trying it. Some of the screws that held the cooler on were rusted and the cooler was full of this black gunk crap I cannot identify. Not good signs.

I'm going to try the bake trick on the two 8800 and the GTX285. The others aren't worth the trouble/waste of thermal paste or need caps first. At least by the time I'm done with all this I should be a master in GPU repair.

Does anybody here have experience baking GPUs?

Yeah, and it was a bad experience. I tried baking a couple different dead cards and I guess I had the temp up too high because it melted all the plastic bits. The cards weren't really worth anything even if they did work so it wasn't really a loss.

What you really want is a soldering station with a hot air gun. Reflowing using one of those is a piece of cake.

What temperature did you use? I plan on removing the entire cooling assembly and as much plastic as I can. The PCIe connector can take the heat I believe as those should be made of a harder type of plastic.

I think I had the oven set at 325f, but not sure anymore.

See here for some more info on people that have tried it.
https://hardforum.com/threads/holy-crap-it-wo … rected.1421792/

I've baked cards and never had the plastics melt, even used a fancy toaster oven to bake a couple of cards.

"Baking" 8800 card won't help it for too long.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

"Baking" 8800 card won't help it for too long.

It's not like I plan to use it everyday. I really just want the benchmark metrics on the Damned thing.

Just bougt... now awaiting delivery.
Creative WaveBlaster II - I'm gonna confront it with WaveBlaster 1 I allready own... Quite interestin if it is really significantly worse as "people say"...

Baked several cards, 8 minutes 200 degrees CELCIUS in a pre-heated oven without coolers. Did work for the 8800gt, 8800gts, 8800gtx and gts250 but never had real good luck with any other card.

The 8800 cards worked fine afterwards but some gave problems again after a few days, some after a couple of months (but not used often in that time).

Maybe a little longer baking is better? don't know but it is in any case not a real permanent fix. you want to benchmark? No problem, that should work with a bit of luck...

The permanent fix is to replace GPU/VRAM solder balls (with a different solder iron) but this can't be done w/o a special equipment.

cyclone3d wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Cleaned the 7800GS OC inside and out. Waiting for it to dry completely before trying it. Some of the screws that held the cooler on were rusted and the cooler was full of this black gunk crap I cannot identify. Not good signs.

I'm going to try the bake trick on the two 8800 and the GTX285. The others aren't worth the trouble/waste of thermal paste or need caps first. At least by the time I'm done with all this I should be a master in GPU repair.

Does anybody here have experience baking GPUs?

Yeah, and it was a bad experience. I tried baking a couple different dead cards and I guess I had the temp up too high because it melted all the plastic bits. The cards weren't really worth anything even if they did work so it wasn't really a loss.

What you really want is a soldering station with a hot air gun. Reflowing using one of those is a piece of cake.

I succesfully baked a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 back to life. It worked until I "pulled" it out of the system and put it back in 😒
To be fair I have to say that I used low temperatures (around the spec of the caps) and didn't give it a lot of time!!

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.

kithylin wrote:

Bought myself a rather special GeForce 7950 GT card. ...

Neat. It's interesting that it's the fastest card of its kind, yet was sold stock with a passive cooler.

SW-SSG wrote:

kithylin wrote:

Bought myself a rather special GeForce 7950 GT card. ...

Neat. It's interesting that it's the fastest card of its kind, yet was sold stock with a passive cooler.

In some older reviews I found of this card, it actually only ran 75c - 80c with the passive cooler. Which may seem hot but they also compared it to the "stock" reference 7950 GT from nvidia at the time which ran 80c - 85c with a fan.

However, one of the first things I plan to do is disassemble the heatsink, clean it with solvent and put fresh TIM paste on it anyway. I'm sure it's dried out by now.

Gamecollector wrote:

The permanent fix is to replace GPU/VRAM solder balls (with a different solder iron) but this can't be done w/o a special equipment.

The other thing that should work fine is to run flux under the chips so it reaches the solder balls and then reflow with a hot air gun.

Pretty much 0 reason to actually remove the chips, clean them and reball them.

It is not like the solder is going to go bad. It just has a bad connection and needs to be fixed. Reflowing properly should work just fine.

kithylin wrote:

Bought myself a rather special GeForce 7950 GT card.

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.

Sweet! Got two of these babies myself. My advice: don't replace the cooling system, it's damn near perfect if you just have something blowing on it. I have my cards running in SLi on a 939 machine (4400+ / A8N SLi) - all I did is attached a 120mm fan to the side of the case so it will blow some air on them - the top one does about 62C while the bottom one does 67C.

Here's a pic:

cyclone3d wrote:

The other thing that should work fine is to run flux under the chips so it reaches the solder balls and then reflow with a hot a […]
Show full quote

Gamecollector wrote:

The permanent fix is to replace GPU/VRAM solder balls (with a different solder iron) but this can't be done w/o a special equipment.

The other thing that should work fine is to run flux under the chips so it reaches the solder balls and then reflow with a hot air gun.

Pretty much 0 reason to actually remove the chips, clean them and reball them.

It is not like the solder is going to go bad. It just has a bad connection and needs to be fixed. Reflowing properly should work just fine.

The solder balls crack in time and the only way to fix that is flux and heat. What I do is add thin flux on the sides of the chip after it's been heated to 120C then use my SMD hot air blower to try and blow the flux under the chip. After that I raise the temp to 200C (gradually) then cool it down (also gradually, 10C / 2 min).

Even so, in some cases it doesn't work. What happens with some cards is the chip's packaging or the PCB itself warps from the heat and that causes the copper pads on the chip package or PCB to break off - and there's no fixing that. I've seen this in most of the cards that failed reflowing - the rest were dead due to bad chips.

kanecvr wrote:

Sweet! Got two of these babies myself. My advice: don't replace the cooling system, it's damn near perfect if you just have something blowing on it. I have my cards running in SLi on a 939 machine (4400+ / A8N SLi) - all I did is attached a 120mm fan to the side of the case so it will blow some air on them - the top one does about 62C while the bottom one does 67C.

Here's a pic:
<snip>

In my research last night I found out actually XFX used this exact same cooler style on multiple different models.
I listed em here for ya with relevant links:

XFX 7950 GT (Silent) - nvidia reference clock core speed, and reference ram speed, silent cooler, 256 MB.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071012133548/ht … rationId=879104

XFX 7950 Extreme, +20 Mhz core and +60 Mhz ram, 256 MB.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071012133543/ht … rationId=879088

XFX 7950 GT Extreme (Silent), +20 Mhz core, +60 Mhz ram, 512 MB.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071012133453/ht … rationId=638442

XFX 7950 GT XXX, +60 Mhz core, +200 Mhz ram, 256 MB.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071012133534/ht … rationId=879071

And top of the line using this cooler style: XFX 7950 GT XXX, +60 Mhz core, +200 Mhz ram, 512 MB.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071012133514/ht … rationId=695916

So.. as you can see, just because your cards have the cooler style, doesn't necessarily mean they're the XXX model.
Maybe yours are though so perhaps check the links and see which ones you ended up with.

EDIT: For those wondering, I found the model #'s listed and the relevant links to plug in to The Internet Archive over here: http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=445&card2=

Fully wrapped within the original styrofoam packaging. And yet this was $2, when for eBay, even the wrapped drives come for around $120 without the original box itself. For shame, online markets. You have finally disappointed me.

Helllooooo, flea markets and computer scrap centers.

Gamecollector wrote:

The permanent fix is to replace GPU/VRAM solder balls (with a different solder iron) but this can't be done w/o a special equipment.

Long term that will not fix the cards as the problem is more deep rooted than that, anyone still remember "bump gate". Once the core is physically damaged one will have to replace the entire gpu or the whole card. VRM failures can be particularly fatal where the gpu core can get zapped with unregulated voltage from the slot or the psu.

Pentium 83 overdrive for 486. One of the estimated 10% that works perfectly at 40 MHz bus/100mhz. Quake at ~20 fps on a 486? Bam!!

Batyra wrote:

Just bougt... now awaiting delivery.
Creative WaveBlaster II - I'm gonna confront it with WaveBlaster 1 I allready own... Quite interestin if it is really significantly worse as "people say"...

Interesting. I picked up a Wave Blaster circa 1993 and eventually a Wave Blaster 2 around 2003. I remember being disappointed in the sound of the WB2 vs the WB. I figured it was just because I was used to the sound of the WB1. My short take is that the WB sounded rather raw (my preference) vs the WB2, which sounded more "synthy." If that makes any sense. I haven't used either in awhile, but I used to use each with MIDI arrangements that I did in addition to games.

Interested in your take, Batyra, even if you want to shoot me a PM.

I didn't realize there was a "people say" consensus RE: 1 vs. 2.