I spotted this card laying on top of a heap in a scrap lot listed online and purchased it along with several other cards. It was a really nice lot, except for the physical condition of the cards. The Raven PCI looked bad... I mean, REALLY bad. I could tell in the seller's picture that the back plate was very bent and rusty and the card itself looked filthy. Still, I knew it was worth a shot. They're quite rare (the PCI version especially). I had one myself for a while and it was a really cool card. The color scheme is really awesome, the Quantum3D software is cool and its a great card for basically everything from 1998 and earlier (even if it runs a bit hot with that tiny heatsink). Plus, it sold for a pretty penny, so I figured it'd be worth restoring, even if it didn't end up working.

When I received the card, it was definitely as bad as it looked from afar in the picture:

Thankfully, it only had one tiny SMD ceramic cap missing near the memory chips on the right side. This card was fixable!

I cleaned the card thoroughly, replaced the cap with one from a donor card, cleaned as much of the rust from the back plate as I could and this is how it looked afterward:

I thought it turned out pretty nice. I was really looking forward to testing it so as soon as I was sure the card was ready, I threw it into my tester, and installed the drivers and it worked perfectly!

This was a very fun restoration and only took a portion of one afternoon. Its too bad the back plate is so pitted, but it really doesn't affect functionality. I couldn't find any with matching layouts in my horde of 100+ cards.

So, next time you see a rusty piece of crap computer component laying in a scrap heap, don't say it's a lost cause!

Here's a gallery with some more pics of the cards I got in the scrap lot and of the restoration process.
https://www.amazon.com/photos/share/iA43aNBml … 67hTf8V6n2NIHuQ