A yellow tinge would be consistent with a weak Blue signal. Have you checked the cable connector?

Yeah the connector on the card seems to be fine, and I reflowed the pins for it. It looks as though there's a capacitor for each colour on the card, as well as those 3 components marked 'L2 L3 and L4' - I'm not sure what those are? Perhaps one of those is faulty on the yellow tinge card?

I've ordered a full set of replacement tantalum capacitors so I'll do both cards. I really hope it'll fix the crashing one, as beyond that I'm not sure where to go with it

The "Lx" traces are Inductors. I'm just a bit curious, in the picture, the left-most piece of additional DRAM, as well as the right-most piece look like they have blemishes on the corners of the sockets--perhaps some of the plastic has broken away? It's hard to tell.

If it were my card, I would make sure all the pins of the main processor are clean at their solder-pads, perhaps with a small metal-bristle brush or by simple running an erasor across them, something to make sure there is no conductive material between the pins.

Do Inductors tend to go bad? I've never come across them before. Yeah 3 of the DRAM chips came with broken legs, so those are where I've soldered on some solid core wire as replacement legs. The extra DRAM works fine in the card with the yellow tint, at first I thought they were the cause until I realised it was only the one card that crashes, and it does it when running only it's own 1MB as well 🙁

I'll give that a shot, thanks! It's really weird, the card that crashes came absolutely spotless, like it was brand new. Whereas the yellow-tinge card came with a half inch thick layer of dust. I thought that was going to be the problem card..

Logistics wrote:

The "Lx" traces are Inductors. I'm just a bit curious, in the picture, the left-most piece of additional DRAM, as well as the right-most piece look like they have blemishes on the corners of the sockets--perhaps some of the plastic has broken away? It's hard to tell.

^ This right here, and also the one circled in green. What's going on with that pin?

It appears the blue color is not completely gone. Does it change when you bend the VGA plug?
If not, it's most likely the video DAC.

You can try to unsolder the ATT20C491 from the unstable card and transplant it to the other.

Brickpad wrote:

Logistics wrote:

The "Lx" traces are Inductors. I'm just a bit curious, in the picture, the left-most piece of additional DRAM, as well as the right-most piece look like they have blemishes on the corners of the sockets--perhaps some of the plastic has broken away? It's hard to tell.

^ This right here, and also the one circled in green. What's going on with that pin?

That's another broken leg on the chip that I soldered some solid core wire onto to resolve. It's not pretty but it does work 😀

Thanks for the tip on the DAC! I'll give that a shot

The termination resistor on the blue line might also be blown or have a dry joint. The termination resistors are probably below the DAC (I can't see the values because of the reflection of the flash) and will be marked 750 for 75 ohms. There will be 3 termination resistors, one for each of the red, green and blue lines, you'll just have to try and find which one is for the blue line.

The other possibilities are one of the SMD capacitors on the low-pass output filter might be blown or have a dry joint or one of the zero ohm resistors (marked 000) is also blown or have a dry joint. (All these components are next to the VGA connector, R14, R15, C50, C51, C52, etc)

If the termination resistor and all the other components are fine then the next step will be to replace the DAC. This will not be a trivial task if you don't have the right equipment.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, I replaced all of the tantalum caps & re-soldered all of the SMD caps and resistors and checked the resistors with a multimeter. The card with the yellow tinge is now fixed and working fine

Unfortunately, the card that randomly crashes is still doing so. I've done the same as above, all tantalum caps replaced, and resoldered all pins on all of the ICs (except the main chip as it's legs are so small), caps, resistors. The card works fine and puts out a beautiful picture, but if you stress it too bad, it dies and displays that yellow screen I've put in my first post. Usually looping a Quicktime video for about 1 minute is enough to kill it.

I'd really like to get this card working, failing that I'll keep it as a spares board for my now working one. What could I check out there? Apart from trying to check the solder on the legs of the main chip, I'm not sure what to do next.

Hey the problem can always be a faulty Video Processor. Or you can try to cool it somehow. And then try to test it.

Tried using a lower bus speed or adjusting bus timings with the faulty card? Maybe it's a little sensitive.