7600 AGP hey? Cool I shall keep an eye out for one 😀

Tetrium wrote:

Didn't the GF7 family have issues with the ball solder-something joints though? If so, then that could be the reason why nobody wants them

I've heard this over the years - none of my 3 cards (5 GPUs - 2 boards are dual-chip) have had problems, nor have other GF7s I've owned or seen (everything from 7600 to 7950). IOW, it may exist, but it's nothing I've ever seen/experienced. I think what may be more likely is that "build a retro computer" or whatever is becoming trendy, and folks gravitate towards what was popular, and the 6600 was certainly more popular than the 7600 (the 7600 had the same problem the FX 5700 did - there was a full-blown x900 card for $10-$20 more on the market at the same time; in the 7600's case that was the 7900GS). Now ofc 7900GS doesn't generally exist on AGP, whereas 7600 does, so for an AGP system the 7600 was/is a great choice. For PCIe I'd guess the 7900GS (and probably even GTX) don't cost much more than a 6600 or 7600 or what-have-you, given that GTX 275s are like $30-$40. If that's the case, I'd just take the step up to 78/7900 series as it'll mean higher performance (and there are some nice single-slot options in the 78/7900 series too).

If I remember right the Mobility GeForce 7 was one of the GPU series included in the litigation for solder-joint failures in laptops (iirc it was like Mobility 6-9 or something); ofc it only affected a small % of users who then promptly flood the Internet and make it look like an issue that every single user experienced after 0.0005sconds of turning the machine on, and that it's a miracle the world continued to exist after such a grave injustice was committed by evil Nazis. 🙄

pewpewpew wrote:

There's more than a little noise online about dud 7600gs. I went through my own hair-pulling trying to get rid of in-game artifacts on my P4R800-VM. Tried better powersupplies, config changes, physical and software reinstalls, older driver, memtests, yada-yada. Eventually tried the card and RAM in a P4P800SE and no problem. Happy ever since. The card just wouldn't work right with the P4R800-VM and I have no explanation for it.

Likely the bridge.

My geforce 7600gs agp has solder problems, had to bake it in the oven twice so far and recap it after the last baking session, also had a friend who's 7600gt pcie suddenly died I'm suspecting the same issue.

One of my 7600gs is a fanless model. It probably had lived in a badly ventilated system all of its life until I rescued it last year (I rescued the whole system).
I mounted a large fan on the heatsink and now it runs really cool. No issues what so ever and the memory clocks to ~1050 Mhz from stock 800 MHz.

The issue with the bad soldering is something I have heard of but if you get one of these cards for a few dollars it could be worth the gamble.
None of my Geforce 7xx0 cards shows any kind of issues with the exception of my 7900GX2 cards, they have issues but its not because of bad soldering, more like bad design and bad drivers.

Yeah GX2 can do weird stuff on boards that don't have 100% SBIOS compatibility with them.