Nerve33 wrote on 2024-04-21, 15:06:

How do I make sure the card won't crap out on me a week after me getting it?

You don't. These are 20+ years old hardware, most of the time with unknown history. You just buy them, do basic maintenance and hope for the best. If the card was in good condition, stored well and you cleaned it and changed thermal grease, you have a fair chance that with the limited use retro hardware get, it'll last for a long time.

For testing, imho one 3DMark test is plenty. If the card is unstable it'll most likely be enough to show. If the card has overheating problems on longer tests due to dry thermal paste, you just risk frying the GPU.

Even if they are faulty, the GF4 and 5 are capacitor plague era cards, I had luck buying faulty ones and fixing them by recaping, but that is a risk to be taken knowing that if you aren't lucky you are left with a faulty card and no room to complain.

Keep in mind testing takes time and effort, which the seller might not to do.
Its a gamble, I sold a lot of stull as untested last year, 99% of it probably worked (allowing 1% for items to die in transit (as RandomStranger said this is old hardware and it will fail eventually) but was all low value stuff, and I was moving countries so doing a clear out so returns would have cost me both time and money I didn't have.

I'd thing about 1/3 of the cost of the price of a working part is a fair price for untested.

Once a card is tested then the seller is absolutely intitled to increase the price if they wish, but of course have to give a full refund if it arrives dead.

Everything I’ve ever bought was untested, you basically can’t test. Even if the seller says they tested, that means nothing. It could have been tested months ago and then break during shipping, who knows. It’s always a gamble.

Nerve33 wrote on 2024-04-21, 15:06:

I was thinking of asking them to run [whatever] for an hour. Is this reasonable?

Only if you reimburse them for their time, independent of whether you end up buying the card or not.

Personally I love the gamble, love it more when it pays off and you get a nice bit of kit at a good price that works, tested stuff tends to fetch a higher premium so I avoid it unless its something hard to get. I dont mind doing the odd repair either but do tend to avoid stuff that has has a visible need for repairs. (Like clearly bloated and burst caps on a motherboard unless its something special and worth the extra work)

The main issue with asking the seller to test is that many dont actually have the required hardware or knowledge to do the tests, they end up with random bits of hardware and just want to offload them.

I would rather do the testing myself.

I like getting stuff that nobody has tried to test. If some slack jawed knuckle dragging neanderthal is gonna subject ancient boards to stress and torment, I prefer that to be me.

If someone has the confidence and competence to test something, it's advertised tested and DOA guaranteed and priced accordingly. If they have not done it, there's a reason, no time, in which case you get a slapdash POST test and you don't even know if video RAM above 256k is any good, or no confidence or competence, they may kill a perfectly good card either before or immediately after getting a "result"... meaning they test it and yank it out with the power on or other atrocity and you still get a dead card or no card.

don't forget to avoid later nvidia forcewares in the 6x.xx range. on win9x they're broken enough to give false "defective" impressions

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-22, 01:17:

I dont mind doing the odd repair either but do tend to avoid stuff that has has a visible need for repairs. (Like clearly bloated and burst caps on a motherboard unless its something special and worth the extra work)

I'm the opposite - I like to get stuff that has (*reasonable*) visible need for repairs, particularly hardware with bad caps, as those are by far the easiest repairs (I have the equipment and quite a few bad boards, so spare caps are not a problem at all.)
Obviously, I won't get any boards that have bad burns or cracks, as those are pretty much impossible to repair (or at least not without a ton of effort.)

BTW, while getting untested retro hardware might give a good return in terms of what works, I find this to almost never be the case with newer PCI-E graphics cards, especially anything high-end that's still current. For example, if someone says they have an "untested" GTX1080 and selling it for parts, because, oh they have no way to test it... be sure that it WAS tested and found to be NOT working 100%. Quite a few dishonest sellers out there that will do this. In contrast, the number of times I've seen sellers to test something and tell you specifically what was wrong with it (and thus sold for parts) are very few. Even fewer that will sell it for a bargain price.

momaka wrote on 2024-04-29, 14:35:

I'm the opposite - I like to get stuff that has (*reasonable*) visible need for repairs, particularly hardware with bad caps, as […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-22, 01:17:

I dont mind doing the odd repair either but do tend to avoid stuff that has has a visible need for repairs. (Like clearly bloated and burst caps on a motherboard unless its something special and worth the extra work)

I'm the opposite - I like to get stuff that has (*reasonable*) visible need for repairs, particularly hardware with bad caps, as those are by far the easiest repairs (I have the equipment and quite a few bad boards, so spare caps are not a problem at all.)
Obviously, I won't get any boards that have bad burns or cracks, as those are pretty much impossible to repair (or at least not without a ton of effort.)

BTW, while getting untested retro hardware might give a good return in terms of what works, I find this to almost never be the case with newer PCI-E graphics cards, especially anything high-end that's still current. For example, if someone says they have an "untested" GTX1080 and selling it for parts, because, oh they have no way to test it... be sure that it WAS tested and found to be NOT working 100%. Quite a few dishonest sellers out there that will do this. In contrast, the number of times I've seen sellers to test something and tell you specifically what was wrong with it (and thus sold for parts) are very few. Even fewer that will sell it for a bargain price.

Yup SMD and BGA makes repairs super aggravating unless you have the board view for the part, equipment required to do SMD and BGA repairs and also the software to test the parts after repairs. (Reballing is nightmare fuel for modern ICs)

I watch this guy on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@northwestrepair and really unless you have a similar level of expertise and tenacity, repairs to modern stuff by the layman is simply not worth the extra effort, best to send it to a shop for repairs.

Tony is a wizard at GPU repairs and just from watching his videos you can tell that nVidia stuff is far easier to repair here than the newer AMD GPUs, AMD really loves to do some asinine shit with their GPUs just to fuck with the repair techs, there is also a lack of both board views and in-depth documented technical knowledge for AMD GPus.