That knocked off capacitor (which is a decoupling cap) would not cause this behavior and was most definitely not the only damage that the card sustained. My bet would be on broken solder joints (possibly under the core or some of the memory ICs). You need to boot the system with a secondary card, check if the 6800 Ultra is detected, and if it is, run the nVidia Mods/Mats tool to see which memory channel is affected.

bloodem wrote on 2026-06-14, 04:44:

That knocked off capacitor (which is a decoupling cap) would not cause this behavior and was most definitely not the only damage that the card sustained. My bet would be on broken solder joints (possibly under the core or some of the memory ICs). You need to boot the system with a secondary card, check if the 6800 Ultra is detected, and if it is, run the nVidia Mods/Mats tool to see which memory channel is affected.

Thanks. I'll do that and report back.

I installed it with a Trident PCI card and it is detected in Windows. While I was formatting a floppy to run MATS the system locked up and wouldn't POST again until I removed the 6800. Not totally giving up, I'll try again with a different motherboard. Heavy sigh, I was really hoping that it was just a small component that was knocked off.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-06-15, 03:41:

I installed it with a Trident PCI card and it is detected in Windows. While I was formatting a floppy to run MATS the system locked up and wouldn't POST again until I removed the 6800. Not totally giving up, I'll try again with a different motherboard. Heavy sigh, I was really hoping that it was just a small component that was knocked off.

Sounds very much like there was some damage under the core which may have been made worse by running the card and letting the core heat up, likely a few broken solder balls under there.
Might be worth finding a repair shop that can re-ball that card and check the memory, its quite a valuable GPU so totally worth getting it repaired professionally if you don't have the tools or skill set.

Northwest Repair comes to mind, no doubt he would love to take a crack at such a legendary GPU and I have watched him repair older GPUs before.

I have a working AGP 6800 Ultra myself and I handle it with kid gloves since its near impossible to replace it at a reasonable price, I really hope you can get yours working again.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-06-15, 03:47:

Sounds very much like there was some damage under the core which may have been made worse by running the card and letting the co […]
Show full quote

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-06-15, 03:41:

I installed it with a Trident PCI card and it is detected in Windows. While I was formatting a floppy to run MATS the system locked up and wouldn't POST again until I removed the 6800. Not totally giving up, I'll try again with a different motherboard. Heavy sigh, I was really hoping that it was just a small component that was knocked off.

Sounds very much like there was some damage under the core which may have been made worse by running the card and letting the core heat up, likely a few broken solder balls under there.
Might be worth finding a repair shop that can re-ball that card and check the memory, its quite a valuable GPU so totally worth getting it repaired professionally if you don't have the tools or skill set.

Northwest Repair comes to mind, no doubt he would love to take a crack at such a legendary GPU and I have watched him repair older GPUs before.

I have a working AGP 6800 Ultra myself and I handle it with kid gloves since its near impossible to replace it at a reasonable price, I really hope you can get yours working again.

That's worth checking into, though I did get lucky last year; a local computer shop that sells some used parts had an AGP card for $10.00 - it was a Quadro FX 4000, so nearly identical to a 6800 Ultra. I have the 6800's cooler on it because I installed an Akasa cooler on the 6800 to try and preserve it.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-06-15, 03:56:

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-06-15, 03:47:

Sounds very much like there was some damage under the core which may have been made worse by running the card and letting the co […]
Show full quote

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-06-15, 03:41:

I installed it with a Trident PCI card and it is detected in Windows. While I was formatting a floppy to run MATS the system locked up and wouldn't POST again until I removed the 6800. Not totally giving up, I'll try again with a different motherboard. Heavy sigh, I was really hoping that it was just a small component that was knocked off.

Sounds very much like there was some damage under the core which may have been made worse by running the card and letting the core heat up, likely a few broken solder balls under there.
Might be worth finding a repair shop that can re-ball that card and check the memory, its quite a valuable GPU so totally worth getting it repaired professionally if you don't have the tools or skill set.

Northwest Repair comes to mind, no doubt he would love to take a crack at such a legendary GPU and I have watched him repair older GPUs before.

I have a working AGP 6800 Ultra myself and I handle it with kid gloves since its near impossible to replace it at a reasonable price, I really hope you can get yours working again.

That's worth checking into, though I did get lucky last year; a local computer shop that sells some used parts had an AGP card for $10.00 - it was a Quadro FX 4000, so nearly identical to a 6800 Ultra. I have the 6800's cooler on it because I installed an Akasa cooler on the 6800 to try and preserve it.

Your sig .. valid, YouTube recommends me a lot of restoration stuff if I binge watch retro PC hardware Vids. My Granddad used to restore old Steam Engines as he was a qualified Steam Engineer and I always thought it was a cool occupation to get into.

Mebe Youtube is also telling me something, I cant deny that restoring Steam Locomotives would be a fun thing to do.

I think the Akasa cooler may have contributed to this. The black plastic backplate you see here cannot be used with the Akasa, but along with mounting the card's stock cooler it also protects (what I now realize) is a fragile area of the card. Then you have two cards in the same bag because of a shortage of anti static bags, then that bag falls over...

The same thing happened on my leadtek 6600gt that I bought in December 2004. One of the surface capacitors fell - I still have it, however the card survived and it is still running 100%! Yours must have sustained additional damage - the fact that Windows froze with the card installed as secondary seems to confirm this.