Had a look at the pictures tho that doesn’t mean anything for Chinese sellers the caps say fp tho I think one of connections is a dummy vga port as well.

Yeah probably not better than any of the other caps.

Dummy VGA?

Yeah like one of the ports isn’t real the pictures aren’t exactly high res will have to see when/if the card arrives 🤣

All three ports work on mine.

Lynxman wrote on 2025-01-12, 15:08:

Thanks for that info. Mine has "FP" caps. They are through hole caps.

"FP" is different from the Sacon FZ caps... though, only maybe.

In general, red caps with a stylize "FP" text on top were originally Fujitsu's Functional Polymer series - real polymer caps with really good ratings. IIRC, Nichicon (a good Japanese brand) bought out Fujitsu, so now the FP caps are Nichicons and still superb quality.
*edit*
Here's a catalog with all of Nichicon FP's different series:
https://www.nichicon.co.jp/english/products/p … catalog_all.pdf

Problem is, this is a Chinese-built card from who knows who / what manufacturer. As such, there are four possibilities here:
- The FP caps seen on the card above may not be genuine, but rather counterfeit polymers.... which should still hold up OK, if we are to judge by other cheap polymer cap brands so far (e.g. CapXon, OST, and etc.)
- They could also still be plain ol' electrolytic caps, but just made without vents to look like real polymers (I have some Sacon FZ like that - they blow up nicely like a firecracker if their bungs don't let out the pressure in time.)
- They could be genuine Fujitsu/Nichicon FP caps from some factories' leftover stock or factory rejects.
- They could be genuine Fujitsu/Nichicon FP caps that really were bought for the build of this card and not factory rejects or NOS/leftover stock... but I think this is the least likely case.

So on a good day, I think there's a 50% chance they are good/legit stuff. But that doesn't mean you should panic and throw away the card or anything like that. Just use them and keep an eye on them from time to time to see if they start looking rounded at the top or bulge from the bottom - that would indicate case #2 above. I doubt the cheap manufacturers would go that far to make a crappy product look so genuine and not actually spend the money to get something better... but having seen all kinds of fake/counterfeit electronics parts, I just can't afford to not be skeptical every time.

As for the video ports - I think all of them should work, even on these cheapo cards. The FX5200/5500 core does have dual RAMDAC, so it would be a big waste (and probably lead to many customer returns) if the manufacturer placed a video port of some kind but didn't have it functional.
FWIW, I have a cheapo Radeon 9600 "XT" (more like a cross between a regular 9600 non-Pro and a Pro, but I digress), and it has both its VGA and DVI ports working as it should. Caps were the same garbage FZ's mentioned earlier, but I recapped it and it's as good as new again. (More on that old project here.)

I wrote about my experience related to these chinese new FX5500 PCI cards.
A warning about these recently made Geforce "FX 5500 PCI" cards

I will just add the note that I have bought two of these recently made cards. One was ok, did pretty much what I expected. The other one though was a mess, so you have to be very careful when buying that you don't get the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel cost-cut version, which I unfortunately got in my later purchase.

This just reinforces my conviction that the older 5200/5500 cards you can find on Ebay are a better purchase. In my experience, the older cards work on older motherboards that don't have three volt PCI slots while these cards can only work in such boards if you run a 3.3 volt line right to the card or modify the motherboard to provide the voltage.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2025-06-22, 01:33:

This just reinforces my conviction that the older 5200/5500 cards you can find on Ebay are a better purchase. In my experience, the older cards work on older motherboards that don't have three volt PCI slots while these cards can only work in such boards if you run a 3.3 volt line right to the card or modify the motherboard to provide the voltage.

Even with older cards, it still depends a lot on each card's design. Some take 5V and use a step-down buck regulator to produce the GPU and RAM voltages, while some others take 3.3V to produce these voltages. And I've also seen a hybrid of these two: one rail generated by 5V line, the other by 3.3V line.

Usually if you don't see any large inductors on the card, then it likely uses linear supply to generate both the RAM and GPU voltages. Since linear regulation is inefficient (dissipates the voltage difference times the current going through as heat), a lot of these all-linear-reg designs are usually powered from the 3.3V rail to reduce losses from inefficiency... though even with these designs, the RAM supply could still be powered from the 5V rail. So you still have to probe through if you want to know exactly.