I am having one of those days.
I got a Geforce FX 5200 today, it was one of the cards in an "untested" AGP-card lot I bought. I tested the card in a i875p XP system and the card worked great (well great for a FX 5200).
I was going to bench the card with my Windows 98 GFX bench system but I noticed that the card had no heatsink under the fan, just a fan strapped to the bare core This is not good for overclocking I thought and removed the fan and installed a heatsink with fan from a FX 5600 XT.
When I installed the card in the bench system I could not get the card right to the bottom of the AGP slot because the new heatsink interfered with the slot, but only very little. The card seemed to work but the 45.23 drivers would not accept the card and forcing the install only resulted in freezes and bluescreens. I thought perhaps it was because the card was not seated correctly in the AGP slot so the first thing I tried was to remove the heatsink I just installed, easier said than done. Now I noticed that the mounting holes on the FX 5200 had a smaller diameter than the FX 5600 XT I had borrowed the heatsink from. Already irritated I used a little bit to much force and while I managed to remove the heatsink I also managed to crush two resistors just beside one of the mounting holes. Who the &!"##&#¤%/& decided to place tiny resistors >2mm from the mounting hole.
I hate Push-Pins especially if you happen to push them through a too narrow mounting hole and then need to remove them.
Then I was going to post this rant and got a bad gateway message... Good times.
edit
It keeps geting better, the lot of AGP cards I bought, "untested but taken from upgraded working computers" was a clear scam.
Out of 12 cards the FX5200 and a GF3 ti200 was the only working ones, well now the ti200 is the only working one.
All the other cards show the same fault. A screen full of artifacts, and yes I have tried them in two systems, some cards in 3 systems.
It would be nice if sellers could be a bit more honest, if cards comes from working systems 10 out of 12 should not be faulty.
This lot of cards were defently someones "broken card pile" with two cheap working cards added.
In Sweden we dont use paypal much so geting money back is a hazzle.
Im thinking perhaps the dead cards were worth the ~30 euro I payed with shipping, some of the cards will look great on the wall.
The lot included two x800xt, two x1650 pro, a 9600 pro a 9550, a 9800 pro, a 6600 GT, some Geforce 2 and a FX 5950 .
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edit2
I could also add that my Desk Lamp collapsed and fell down on my test-bench right on the Zalman CPU cooler, totally bizzarre I was not even close to the test-bench when it happend.
It is just one of those days... the CPU did not get crushed but it could have been.
/edit2
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.