Today I am taking a look at a Radeon 9000 Pro in reference design.

This card was bought as working, though I had the impression from the offering that the card it pretty beat up.

### First Impressions ###

The card arrived in a pityful condition. It was very dirty on pins and pads. Basically every electrolytic capacitor had scratches on it, some of them had significant dents.

It was in dire need of a cleaning and some love.

### Diagnosis ###

Though the card was offered as working, it was behaving weird. In windows, even though the driver installed fine, the UI was sluggish and there appeared to be no hardware acceleration. Furthermore running 3DMark2001SE showed that a) the card appeared to be unstable and b) the result screen had graphical errors.

So after the first test, I took a look at the card in detail.

There is one capacitor missing at the VDDC regulator. According to pictures it is 470µF/16V. The 3.3µH inductor of the VDDC regulator is also broken.

There is also a blocking capacitor missing at one memory IC.

On the back, there are 0 Ohm jumper resistors missing and broken, which are parts of the AGP signal lines.

### Repair ###

Since all electrolytic caps looked bad and some had dents, I decided to basically re-cap the card. I am by far no fan of "recapping for the sake of recapping", but this card deserved better.

The missing capacitor was replaced by scraping off some silkscreen from the PCB above the missing pad. Then I was able to solder the new capacitor to it.

I also removed the old 3.3µH inductor and replaced it with a new one.

The broken AGP signal line jumpers have been removed, pads cleaned and new 0 Ohm jumpers have been installed.

### Testing ###

After the repair the card works just fine again. No more instability or graphical glitches. And the 2D mode was properly accellerated again and windows ran smooth.

### Parts used ###

12 x 22µF / 16V - EMZA160ADA220MD61G - Europe Chemi-Con
2 x 47µF / 6.3V - EMZA6R3ADA470MD61G - Europe Chemi-Con
4 x 1000µF / 10V - EEUFM1A102 - Panasonic
3 x 470µF / 16V - EMZA160ADA471MHA0G - Europe Chemi-Con
2 x 100µF / 16V - EEEFK1C101P - Panasonic
1 x 100nF / 50V - C0603C104K5RACAUTO - KEMET
1 x 3.3µH - PISM-3R3M-04 - Fastron

Very nice work...

Very nice work indeed! And I love that you're documenting these. This thread has great potential as a densely packed source of info for repairing various video card problems.

Just out of curiosity, are those Radeon BGA memory failures ever fixed by reflowing or removing and resoldering the same chip, due to a broken solder joint, or is it always a matter of the chip itself failing? Also, did you do anything involving shimming the GPU die since lack of contact with the heatsink is often cited as a problem with these?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-05-02, 17:14:

Very nice work indeed! And I love that you're documenting these. This thread has great potential as a densely packed source of info for repairing various video card problems.

I hope to keep many more cards alive for the upcoming generations. It's not only for the "retro" aspect of it, but also to preserve the past. So I hope my documentation and (hopefully) the ones from others over the time will help achieving this goal.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-05-02, 17:14:

Just out of curiosity, are those Radeon BGA memory failures ever fixed by reflowing or removing and resoldering the same chip, due to a broken solder joint, or is it always a matter of the chip itself failing? Also, did you do anything involving shimming the GPU die since lack of contact with the heatsink is often cited as a problem with these?

I did not go so far as reballing existing chips. However a stencil etc. is just underway, as I want to give it a shot. I also have donor cards which have known to be good memory ICs, so I want to re-use / re-cycle them in my repairs. I did give it a shot some times to do some "reflow" with proper heat, but it never turned out to resolve the issue so far.

I did not remove the shims of any of those GPUs (R300, R350 and R360) - I usually try to use appropriate coolers (e.g., original ones from ATI for the 9800 series) or thermal pads with proper sizing. I'd like to keep cards "as is" if possible, retaining them the way they were build (incl. their mistakes sometimes).

This is also why I don't use different types of caps, like poscaps or tantals instead of electrolytes or vice versa. There are people doing this, but I don't feel like this is my niche. Repair and use with what it has been designed with.

Again to both of you, thanks for your kind words.

More cards to come!

Todays card: Radeon 9700 Pro with artifacts. Always occuring.

### First impressions ###

Card is clean and tidy. No noticable damages to the PCB or parts on it.

### Diagnosis ###

Fault is not influenced by temperature or pressure. Checked all memory ICs, no change. Voltages are all fine.

A run of R3MEMID shows an error on MDC0

1R3MEMID version 1.07, (c) Copyright ATI Technologies Inc, 2003
2Log file generation enabled to .\R3MEMID.LOG ...
3Reference data file (RDF) loading disabled ...
4[1  ] Fill                                                : FAIL
5    Error ID 0VB001
6  1024 x  768 - 32 bpp ( 60 Hz): TEST FAILURE
7    failing bit : MDC0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 

This is U58 according to the schematic. It's on the top side of the GPU.

The broken memory part is - again - a K4D26323RA-GC2A.

### The repair ###

I replaced the memory IC with a K4D26323RA-GC2B, as in previous repairs.

### Testing ###

R3MEMID, 3Dmark01SE, 3DMark2003, Aquarmark3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R all run without issues. The card is fixed up.

I've cleaned the cooler thoroughly and re-assembled the card.

Hey, I really like your topic about repairs, I was looking for something like this and finding any information about repairing ati radeon cards is very difficult. I have collected a few radeon 9800 pro and xt (most of them bought from electronic waste) and most of them start but display small artifacts, I would really like to try to repair them, if it's not a problem I have a few questions for you. First, where can I download the R3MEMID program, I don't know why but it is very difficult to find on the internet for me, I wasted a lot of time on it without results 😒 Secondly, I have a question about identifying which memory chip is damaged based on the results displayed by the program, can you share your knowledge or a diagram of what markings mean which memory? You wrote "This is U58 according to the schematic. It's on the top side of the GPU.", can you make public the diagrams that you have? Sorry for such a long message but maybe thanks to your answer a few Radeons will come back to life, best regards 😉

Hey there.

Let me try to answer all questions you have.

First of all, R3MEMID. It has been uploaded here at vogons already, so I'd give credit to the original poster: Re: Hercules Radeon 9700 Pro: weird output
You can run it under Freedos, however you'll need dos4gw alongside it.

This tool returns you a list of bit errors on the corresponding memory channels. For a bit more in-depth information about that process, see: Hercules Radeon 9700 Pro repair report

The Radeon 9700 (R300) and Radeon 9800 (R350/R360) are pin-to-pin compatible. This means, a R300 GPU could run on a Radeon 9800 PCB and vice versa (and some manufacturers did that in the past). This knowledge is important because that means that basically all that applies to a Radeon 9700 applies to the 9800 as well.

If you compare both cards in their reference layouts, you will see that they share a lot! The PCB might be slightly different, but the parts used are mostly the same. I figured out that between Radeon 9800 and 9700 cards, the memory designation (UXX) is the same, so you are safe to assume that the assignment of chip per channel is the same as well.

I attached a schematic of a Radeon 9700 Pro, as for myself, I don't have a schematic of a reference 9800Pro/XT (I got some from MSI cards though). That might clarify some things as well.

I order to have a quick lookup, I created the following graphic which tells you which IC belongs to which bits of the memory channels on reference Radeon 9500 (256bit). 9700 (nonPro & Pro) and 9800 (nonPro & Pro) cards.

Ha ha, I'm analyzing the information from you with a radeon 9800pro in my hand and now everything has become clear, the small markings near the RAM chips match the diagram, I also checked how it looks on a radeon 9800pro 256bit and a radeon 9800 XXXL from Medion, the descriptions are in slightly different places but all the markings are the same. You have no idea how happy I am to understand this, thank you very much for the explanation 😄 Now all I have to do is make a proper machine for testing and practice my memory soldering skills on some cheap office card, and I can start having fun repairing these radeons 😉

Don't take memory errors directly as a fault of the memory chip itself. I've had cards with parts/traces missing / broken around the affected memory chip. So it's good to take it as a first indicator and then rule out possible culprits one by one.