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X1950 XTX - missing SMDs

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First post, by Shader_BiH

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Hi folks. Recently I purchased an X1950 XTX. Although it looked examplary at first, once it arrived I noticed two missing SMDs on the back.

IMG-20260504-172212.jpg

IMG-20260504-172153.jpg

The card appears to be working fine though. I am a bit worried about pushing it too much with benchmarks as I don't know what these two are for exactly. Can anyone help me identify these two elements? Are they vital for stable operation and is it even safe to use it like this?

Thanks 😃

Last edited by Shader_BiH on 2026-05-04, 18:14. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 8, by tehsiggi

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Just took a second look at the PCB pictures from the front. The "lonely" cap is nowhere positioned to be a bootstrap cap for any of the FETs or drivers imho, so I'd assume you're fine with it missing. However it's far from optimal of course. If you have the means, desolder one of the other "lonely" ones (like C2034) and measure it, it is going to be the same value as your missing C2537. Same for C2546, just measure it's neighbor when removed from the PCB and you'd be good. Voltage wise you can carefully measure what's going on there, but I'd assume 25V type ceramics should be fine (keep in mind the capacitance degradation of ceramics when DC biased).

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Reply 3 of 8, by Shader_BiH

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tehsiggi wrote on 2026-05-05, 08:46:

Just took a second look at the PCB pictures from the front. The "lonely" cap is nowhere positioned to be a bootstrap cap for any of the FETs or drivers imho, so I'd assume you're fine with it missing. However it's far from optimal of course. If you have the means, desolder one of the other "lonely" ones (like C2034) and measure it, it is going to be the same value as your missing C2537. Same for C2546, just measure it's neighbor when removed from the PCB and you'd be good. Voltage wise you can carefully measure what's going on there, but I'd assume 25V type ceramics should be fine (keep in mind the capacitance degradation of ceramics when DC biased).

Thank you very much tehsiggi 😁. Unfortunately I am not good with soldering, so I will have to find someone who's got experience repairing these. I did found one "for parts X1950 XTX" on ebay, I think I can make a good deal for it so, if I get it, I plan to use it for fixing this one. It's PCB looks good.

Reply 5 of 8, by zuldan

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Shader_BiH wrote on 2026-05-05, 19:29:

Thank you very much tehsiggi 😁. Unfortunately I am not good with soldering, so I will have to find someone who's got experience repairing these. I did found one "for parts X1950 XTX" on ebay, I think I can make a good deal for it so, if I get it, I plan to use it for fixing this one. It's PCB looks good.

I’ve been pinged! (Thanks tehsiggi, really strange you can’t @mention here).

I’ve tried to get that eBayer down to a reasonable price so it can be used for parts but he won’t budge.

I’m happy to remove parts and check the capacitance to get another card working (voltage will have to be a guess) but I’m not too keen on doing that to a mint condition card if you don’t know how to solder. Do you not have the tools or don’t have the confidence?

Reply 6 of 8, by Shader_BiH

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zuldan wrote on 2026-05-06, 08:46:
I’ve been pinged! (Thanks tehsiggi, really strange you can’t @mention here). […]
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Shader_BiH wrote on 2026-05-05, 19:29:

Thank you very much tehsiggi 😁. Unfortunately I am not good with soldering, so I will have to find someone who's got experience repairing these. I did found one "for parts X1950 XTX" on ebay, I think I can make a good deal for it so, if I get it, I plan to use it for fixing this one. It's PCB looks good.

I’ve been pinged! (Thanks tehsiggi, really strange you can’t @mention here).

I’ve tried to get that eBayer down to a reasonable price so it can be used for parts but he won’t budge.

I’m happy to remove parts and check the capacitance to get another card working (voltage will have to be a guess) but I’m not too keen on doing that to a mint condition card if you don’t know how to solder. Do you not have the tools or don’t have the confidence?

I have a very basic chinese soldering iron, and I tried to do replace some capacitors before. Let's just say I do a very ugly job 😁 Let me know if you also need a "for parts" card for your project. I might get that guy to lower the price because of the one I purchased. I think we could both get what we need of that PCB to fix our cards. I will have to wait end of the month however, because I made a lot of other purchases and Im kind of hitting my retro allowance for April 😁

Thank you both very much for your responses. I'm now a lot more optimistic about getting this card to it's full factory state.

Reply 7 of 8, by momaka

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Looking at the pictures, and from having observed various ATI cards from that and latter era (e.g. X1950 Pro, HD3870, and HD4870), I am like 99.9% certain both of these caps are for the GPU V_core output filtering. If that's the case (you should verify, of course, see next paragraph below), then there shouldn't be a problem to use the card as-is. I agree it's not optimal, but it won't cause any damage to the card. Worst case, a noisy GPU V_core voltage might cause crashes or almost invisible artifacts that don't make anything crash. But in most cases, that won't happen at all, simply because the filtering of the GPU rails is designed to have some overhead on the permissible noise levels. Thus, loosing a few filtering ceramic caps that are for filtering won't cause any issues usually.

That said, it is a good idea to verify that these caps are as what we suspect they are. You can do that very easily if you have a multimeter: just measure the resistance across the pads on the two missing caps. If both show the same (likely very low) resistance, then they are all connected in parallel and probably part of the GPU V_core filtering.

@tehsiggi suggested that one of these caps (that appears to be alone) might be part of the VRM bootstrap... but I find that unlikely, as bootstrap capacitors are not usually placed nearby and/or on the same large traces that are part of the power rails in order to avoid injecting noise into the VRMs. Usually they are more likely to be close to the PWM controller itself.

The fact that the card works fine, however, suggests that everything is probably fine. But again, just verify with a multimeter if you have one. You could also measure the voltage on the pads of the missing caps to verify if they are on the same rail. However, I usually caution against this unless you are experienced and/or have very steady hands, as it would be easy to slip the probes and short out something and cause more damage. In contrast, measuring the resistance should be much safer, because you do it with the power off / card removed from the PC.

If these caps are indeed part of the VRM output (or perhaps maybe input?), my guess would be that they are in the 4.7 to 10 uF range, and probably rated 10V minimum to 25V max, depending if they are on the input or output.

Reply 8 of 8, by tehsiggi

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momaka wrote on 2026-05-06, 17:17:

@tehsiggi suggested that one of these caps (that appears to be alone) might be part of the VRM bootstrap... but I find that unlikely, as bootstrap capacitors are not usually placed nearby and/or on the same large traces that are part of the power rails in order to avoid injecting noise into the VRMs. Usually they are more likely to be close to the PWM controller itself.

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-05-05, 08:46:

Just took a second look at the PCB pictures from the front. The "lonely" cap is nowhere positioned to be a bootstrap cap for any of the FETs or drivers imho, so I'd assume you're fine with it missing.

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