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NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra triage and repair

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First post, by Kahenraz

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I bought this GeForce FX 5900 on eBay for a good price a few months ago and I'm just now getting around to looking at it. The listing stated:

Powers up and fan spins when plugged in to motherboard but no display. Strictly for parts. Sold AS IS.

This is not strictly accurate. When I tested it, the entire system powers on briefly with the GPU fan spinning momentarily before everything shuts off on its own. This isn't very helpful and the cause for the problem could be almost anywhere.

Here are some photos of the board:

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The board uses Hynix HY5DU283222AF-22 GDDR memory.

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I wasn't able to find anything obvious from a visual inspection so I proceeded to remove the heatsink and fan. What I found underneath was a surprise.

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The previous owner had sanded down the die to the copper surface. The underside of the painted heatsink had also been sanded to the bare aluminum. I don't know how much of an improvement this would have made over simply replacing the stock cooler with an aftermarket one.

There was also some damage to the surface of the clock crystal as a result of the sanding but I don't know if this caused any damage to it.

A closer inspection under a microscope revealed a significant oxidation and a small amount of corrosion but nothing alarming at first. I had initially intended to wash the board and then try reflowing some of the joints but then I spotted this.

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I can only attach 5 images per post. Read on below...

Last edited by Kahenraz on 2021-11-26, 04:14. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 9, by Kahenraz

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I use these small red stickers to mark any problems as I work so that I can find them again quickly in the future. This is especially helpful in the event that I need to set it aside while waiting for a replacement part.

Here is a closer picture taken with my microscope. At some point during maintenance or resurfacing, one of the capacitors got knocked off. This is beneath the large black heatsink on the back of the card where it should have been protected from this kind of damage.

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I am continuing my triage but this repair has just been upgraded from "mystery" to "promising"!

Here is a photo of the damaged clock crystal. It's probably fine.

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I'm also finding fine copper shavings as a result of the sanding process. It looks like there were other SMD components that ended up with some kind of surface damage as well. It's possible that there is a short somewhere besides the missing capacitor.

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Upon further inspection it's actually even worse than I thought. This is pretty terrible. C97 reads as a 0 ohm dead short.

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Last edited by Kahenraz on 2021-11-26, 03:47. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 4 of 9, by BitWrangler

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Any surface mount that got ground is probably going to be out of spec even if it still resists or capacitates... In extreme modding you can "trim" values like that, carefully, but random mowing at them will have the values much less than they should be.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 5 of 9, by Kahenraz

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I'd like to make an attempt at fixing this but I'll need another card to use as a reference for the damaged components. This is probably a lost cause but these SMD parts are so easy to replace that I think it's worth a try.

The thing I am worried about most of all is whether or not some of the debris got under the GPU or memory chips and is causing a short there.

Reply 8 of 9, by Tetrium

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chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-05-25, 13:07:

Have you had any luck getting this card working again?

Would also like to know ^^

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Reply 9 of 9, by Kahenraz

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I needed another 5900 to source from to test against for replacement parts. This ended up taking longer than expected, since I also wanted to find one that worked.

I won a very nice looking GeForce FX 5900 Ultra with a stock cooler from eBay
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 triage and repair
The FX 5900 runs cool as a cucumber

I could have used the one with the defective memory, but instead started making a pile of these in repair bin. I still have this card, and I'll take a look at it again at some point.

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