Hi,
I started with a good water cleaning + dishsoap, rinced it with demineralized water and finally "baked" it 30min at 80°C.
The PCB is now nice and clean... and it's still working! But nothing better than before unfortunately: imposible to launch 3D stuff without freezing.
A guy told me to do the same thing as dm- : decklocking. And here we have interesting things...
I installed rivatuner and began to fiddle with core and memory frequencies.
Stock configuration is 350MHz for the core and 700MHz for the RAM (350MHz clock and 700MHz effective DDR frequency?)
I tried to reduce them by 50MHz but the rivatuner test failed. Minus 50MHz, failed again...
Finally 200MHz for the core and 450MHz for the memory was ok and with these settings, I'm now able to run 3D tests without freezes.
I refined the settings and finally found that the core frequency can be set at its max value, 350MHz without any problem. It can even be pushed a bit to 360MHz.
On the other hand, rivatuner test refuse to pass with RAM frequency above 470MHz (whereas it should be 700MHz!!).
In these conditions, 3D scores are a bit behind a vanilla 6800.
The good news is that the core seems to be in good shape!
RAM chips are Hynix HY5DU283222AF-22, which correspond to 2.2ns DDR, able to work at a clock frequency of 450MHz (900Mbps/pin) @ 2.8V according the datasheet.
I'm confused with frequency in rivatuner: is it the clock or the "effective" frequency ? I think it's the effective one because it reports 700MHz (i.e. 350MHz clock freq ?)
That would mean the actual clock frequency for which it works is 450/2 = 275MHz ?!! Whereas it should work fine at 450MHz clock frequency!!!
I also extracted the BIOS with nvflash and checked it with NiBiTor: it's perfectly fine and bit-to-bit equivalent to one of the two 5.40.02.15.00 found here: https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architec … memSize=&since=
So it shouldn't have been modified to overclock the RAM.
I'm not convinced by a thermal issue on the RAM chips beacause they stay cool and I remind you that MATS memory tests have always passed successfully.
Maybe a RAM VRM issue... From the beginning I'm using an old (but still good) low ESR electrolythic cap to replace the bulgy one, at the RAM VRM output...
NB : I'm using 91.31 drivers but same things happen with older 71.89 drivers.
What do you think ?
JB