Your biggest issue with them and all cards from that time period is the terrible lead free solder they used

candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-21, 11:44:

Your biggest issue with them and all cards from that time period is the terrible lead free solder they used

I remember some discussion back then on the subject. I wanted to use one of this cause I'm building a P4 3,2ghz (unfortunately northwood, my mobo has the old type of P4 mainboards mosfet design and while the bios support Prescotts this power circuitry revision "better not") and the more features came from the vga the better it'd have been. Beside the card is slow as expected but still support HD decoding and it's passive considering how loud the P4 cooler were already...

386SX wrote on 2020-05-21, 11:16:

Hi,

I have two Sapphire HD3x50 cards, those ones with the back bridge chip without heatsink on it, one is a HD3450 and a HD3650. They both run at quite high temperature considering the bridge chip itself is so hot I can burn my finger immediately. I never understood why these didn't have an heatsink beside the protective pink pad on the package surface. Considering lately the HD3650 seems to be broken (at boot text is already vertically shifted, corrupted while it was running ok just a year ago and I never used it a lot), I was asking myself if these cards, considering also their layout complexity with that bridge chip, are safe to use in a retro machine or better to collect and the ones you had/have still runs ok? The HD3450, has a big passive heatsink on the gpu but become really hot, in linux I enabled the dynamic power management and probably will use an external fan too but still for its speed I was thinking maybe it's not worth it?
Thank

I bought 2 AGP 7600GS passively cooled cards back when they were new. These ran very hot that while using one of them, it would overheat when playing Unreal 2 so I added 8cm case fans to both of them.

These are not the latest bridged AGP cards (and I know this doesn't directly answer your question) but these do feature the newer solder afaia. I could suggest you do the same with your passively cooled bridged AGP cards.

Those bridge chips are so tiny, I'm not sure how feasible it would be to somehow mount a custom heatsink to it. But the addition of a larger fan mounted directly to the large passive heatsink did fix the overheating issue on both these cards (and both these cards were used extensively for a number of years).

Tetrium wrote on 2020-05-26, 11:18:

I bought 2 AGP 7600GS passively cooled cards back when they were new. These ran very hot that while using one of them, it would […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2020-05-21, 11:16:

Hi,

I have two Sapphire HD3x50 cards, those ones with the back bridge chip without heatsink on it, one is a HD3450 and a HD3650. They both run at quite high temperature considering the bridge chip itself is so hot I can burn my finger immediately. I never understood why these didn't have an heatsink beside the protective pink pad on the package surface. Considering lately the HD3650 seems to be broken (at boot text is already vertically shifted, corrupted while it was running ok just a year ago and I never used it a lot), I was asking myself if these cards, considering also their layout complexity with that bridge chip, are safe to use in a retro machine or better to collect and the ones you had/have still runs ok? The HD3450, has a big passive heatsink on the gpu but become really hot, in linux I enabled the dynamic power management and probably will use an external fan too but still for its speed I was thinking maybe it's not worth it?
Thank

I bought 2 AGP 7600GS passively cooled cards back when they were new. These ran very hot that while using one of them, it would overheat when playing Unreal 2 so I added 8cm case fans to both of them.

These are not the latest bridged AGP cards (and I know this doesn't directly answer your question) but these do feature the newer solder afaia. I could suggest you do the same with your passively cooled bridged AGP cards.

Those bridge chips are so tiny, I'm not sure how feasible it would be to somehow mount a custom heatsink to it. But the addition of a larger fan mounted directly to the large passive heatsink did fix the overheating issue on both these cards (and both these cards were used extensively for a number of years).

And and ati before attached a red pad around the chip to protect it, you could use some thermal epoxy on the die and gentle clamping to make a good connect and after it's got good die contact put a dab of non conductive epoxy at the corners of the heatsink to the board.

386SX wrote on 2020-05-21, 12:04:

candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-21, 11:44:

Your biggest issue with them and all cards from that time period is the terrible lead free solder they used

I remember some discussion back then on the subject. I wanted to use one of this cause I'm building a P4 3,2ghz (unfortunately northwood, my mobo has the old type of P4 mainboards mosfet design and while the bios support Prescotts this power circuitry revision "better not") and the more features came from the vga the better it'd have been. Beside the card is slow as expected but still support HD decoding and it's passive considering how loud the P4 cooler were already...

You want Northwood, it's faster than Prescott clock for clock excluding sse3 optimized software, in games Northwood was on average 5% faster at the same clock speed.

candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-26, 17:01:

And and ati before attached a red pad around the chip to protect it, you could use some thermal epoxy on the die and gentle clam […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote on 2020-05-26, 11:18:

I bought 2 AGP 7600GS passively cooled cards back when they were new. These ran very hot that while using one of them, it would […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2020-05-21, 11:16:

Hi,

I have two Sapphire HD3x50 cards, those ones with the back bridge chip without heatsink on it, one is a HD3450 and a HD3650. They both run at quite high temperature considering the bridge chip itself is so hot I can burn my finger immediately. I never understood why these didn't have an heatsink beside the protective pink pad on the package surface. Considering lately the HD3650 seems to be broken (at boot text is already vertically shifted, corrupted while it was running ok just a year ago and I never used it a lot), I was asking myself if these cards, considering also their layout complexity with that bridge chip, are safe to use in a retro machine or better to collect and the ones you had/have still runs ok? The HD3450, has a big passive heatsink on the gpu but become really hot, in linux I enabled the dynamic power management and probably will use an external fan too but still for its speed I was thinking maybe it's not worth it?
Thank

I bought 2 AGP 7600GS passively cooled cards back when they were new. These ran very hot that while using one of them, it would overheat when playing Unreal 2 so I added 8cm case fans to both of them.

These are not the latest bridged AGP cards (and I know this doesn't directly answer your question) but these do feature the newer solder afaia. I could suggest you do the same with your passively cooled bridged AGP cards.

Those bridge chips are so tiny, I'm not sure how feasible it would be to somehow mount a custom heatsink to it. But the addition of a larger fan mounted directly to the large passive heatsink did fix the overheating issue on both these cards (and both these cards were used extensively for a number of years).

And and ati before attached a red pad around the chip to protect it, you could use some thermal epoxy on the die and gentle clamping to make a good connect and after it's got good die contact put a dab of non conductive epoxy at the corners of the heatsink to the board.

386SX wrote on 2020-05-21, 12:04:

candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-21, 11:44:

Your biggest issue with them and all cards from that time period is the terrible lead free solder they used

I remember some discussion back then on the subject. I wanted to use one of this cause I'm building a P4 3,2ghz (unfortunately northwood, my mobo has the old type of P4 mainboards mosfet design and while the bios support Prescotts this power circuitry revision "better not") and the more features came from the vga the better it'd have been. Beside the card is slow as expected but still support HD decoding and it's passive considering how loud the P4 cooler were already...

You want Northwood, it's faster than Prescott clock for clock excluding sse3 optimized software, in games Northwood was on average 5% faster at the same clock speed.

Yeah I suppose but the SSE3 thing make it a bit more "modern" even if probably not so much in real life usage. I suppose I may see the difference in web browsers and youtube considering Linux doen't have (or I couldn't get it to work) hardware decoding for video.
In the meanwhile I already put four heasinks on the four mosfets of the mobo. They are Raspberry usb chip heatsinks and not really large but better than nothing. I suppose I may try using a 3,2 or 3,4Ghz prescott if I'd find the Loadline B core models, I'm following one to buy because they are in the 90W range like the max supported 3,2Ghz Northwood power requirements. I already have one 3,4Ghz Prescott but the Loadline A and it ask more than 103W of TDP and up to 115W I suppose and probably the board would seriously risk and to change those mosfets seems a nightmare (smd solderded very close to the mosfets pins).