VOGONS


First post, by RayeR

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Oldbie

One friend gave me this card which was saved from a scrap to let me do the best I can (waited ~1 year for it).
As you can see, someone ripped off the MDRAMs rude way so some PCB traces and pads was damaged. Also the GPU has some scratches and bent pins. I finally had some time to look at it.

The attachment et6000.jpg is no longer available

But at first I had to get some MDRAMs - thank to moturimi1 who sold me 4, not in best condition but I was able to repair one missing pin (later I found it was not connected on the card anyway 😀 I wonder how many unconnected pins that package has...
Re: MoSYS MDRAM chips to upgrade an ET6000 for sale

So started work on the card I did:
* glue 2 riped traces and added 2 pads for MDRAM
* straighten and resolder ET6000 pins - I revealed that may of them was just floating above pads without connection when poke them by a needle
* solder on 4 PLCC SMD sockets for MDRAMs
* add missing capacitors
* check all under stereoscope magnifier
* burn VBIOS 0.16 image from TheRetroweb to M27256 and put in the socket

The attachment 09-ohnuté piny na ET6000.jpg is no longer available
The attachment 10-přilepené cesty k MDRAM.jpg is no longer available

Then finally put it in PC and it failed to POST at code 0Bh (Award). It didn't matter if VBIOS ROM was present or pulled out and the same for MDRAM chips. I though there might be some short or broken trace under the ET6000 so I carefully desoldered it with hot air and bottom heater but no signs of damage underneath. So I soldered it back on...
This time PC booted but with black screen like VGA wouldn't present. I blindly run my DOS tool to do PCI dump and then check the log file. The ET6000 was present but strange things seen. The PCI VID:DID sometimes changed from 100C:3208 to 100C:3218, the class changed from 03 (VGA) to 02 (network adapter), BAR changed and it had 7 function blocks - I guess it should had only one. In newer Dell PC the BIOS thrown some PCI card parity error asking me for disable NMI. So there was definitely some PCI communication problem. I started with a DMM diode test to check all signal pads on PCI edge connector and found some floating pins:
PCI ---------- GPU
A25 - AD[24] 6
A28 - AD[22] 11
A29 - AD[20] 13 - sometimes works
I traced them from PCI pad to ET6000 pin and the traces and via and solder joint was fine but the pin itself was internally disconnected from silicon chip. So this is end for me that I cannot repair this inside the chip. I would need to get some replacement. But currently I see only one offer at ebay with insane shipping from USA 🙁

Gigabyte GA-P67-DS3-B3, Core i7-2600K @4,5GHz, 8GB DDR3, 128GB SSD, GTX970(GF7900GT), SB Audigy + YMF724F + DreamBlaster combo + LPC2ISA