# Noname-Gigabyte FX5200XT with G-Luxon caps



## trodas (May 2, 2007)

A long time ago I has a GForce2Ti card, passively cooled with HUGE glued on heatsinks that ran at GPU/mem 268/240Mhz clocks stable. But one day I decide to _cut a supposedly unused part of the board_ to gain better airflow in the case from the top right corner of the card. The card still works, but instead of 64MB of videoram I got now only 32MB and the game Return to the Castle Wolfenstain started jerking because there was suddently not enough videoram for textures...
So I wanted a quick solution and bough this cheapo FX5200 card and regret that ASAP. It was notably slower, even I managed to overclock it from default 250/166 to 295/205... This disapointment lead to the buy of Radeon 9100 that lead to even bigger disapointment with speed and drivers problems in SoF2, ma favorite game at the time, but that is another story.

So, that is how I got the card, lol. It was used sometimes for testing purposes, the Zalman heatpipe cooler is, however, sometimes limiting - the card did not fit everywhere, but I will work on that later   (if ever, lol)

Overview of the card:






Now during the ECS sponsored OCW contest to reach the lowest 3DMark 2005 score ( http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=62120 ) I thought I could use the card to gain lowest score of all participiants, perhaps even WR when I use the crappy slow VIA C3 CPU in Abit BX133-Raid mobo I recently recapped 
But in serious downclocking the card become unstable. Obviously the G-Luxon caps are the culprits. There they are:





The card use these caps:
Gigabite FX5200
---------------
5x 1000uF 6.3V d10 G-Luxon
1x 510uF 4V d8 Sanyo Os-con
1x 100uF 10V d5 Nichicon VR






Obviously the Os-con polymer is great cap and since I have no bigger/betteer polymer ATM, it stays. It is obviously used for the GPU voltage.






That is probably why I can clock the GPU as low, as t 8Mhz and it still working well in 3D  Memory is another story. With 66Mhz it never pass 3DMark (took 12 - 16hours with stressed machine, so, go figure...) and at 60Mhz it can't even initialize 3D!  With G-Luxons, of course.

Now with Samxons GC:





It can run 3DMark at 50Mhz! Any maybe lower, I did not tried the full test yet and maybe it fail still, because it is just like in half, so... We see. Neverless it is a clear change for better overclock/underclock as they are basicaly the same. Both put a lot more stress on voltage regulators 






I used 1500uF Samxon GX d10 caps to bump the capacity a little, because I believe it is important when downlocking a lot. But the card design is very odd. First at all, it reverse the markings on PCB. In all other cards/mainboards the white half of the circle on PCB bellow a cap mean the "-" polarity. On this board (and on the FX5600XT one, check there: http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=58455 ) it is REVERSED!
But that is not all odd. Notice how far (first photo) are the caps form the rams! This is not very good. Caps have to support the voltage as close to the place where it is being "consumed" as possible. Having them on other side of the card is not exactly good design. Perhaps that is why Gigabite is not printed over the board anywhere?  They are ashamed of the design, probably, and rightfully they are!  






See this? Someone realized that the rams need additional support, and get there ready a place for another cap, but for the cost reasons it was never included. That of course call for adding a nice SMD d8 polymer there to support the voltage filtering and get better the overlock/underclock 
At least something around 470uF will help for sure. This place is connected directly in parallel with one of the Samxon GC 1500uF (top right one), so...






So at least I laped the core well 






And now let's try score really, really hard! 



 


This that get me score 31 points was only a start!


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## technicks (May 2, 2007)

Loved it all the way. Great stuff man.


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## Frogger (May 2, 2007)

Looks like you enjoyed doing the work ,,, and half of this Hobby/trade is having fun  nice clean work  . and after all it was just collecting dust  look forward to your 1950xt mod


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## trodas (May 3, 2007)

I got score 6 3DMarks 2005 now!  

Samxon caps rule! Now testing 4Mhz for core...  

Abit BX133-Raid, VIA C3 Nehemiah 66 x 9
Gigabite(?) FX5200 8/50Mhz ( thread about the card used to take this score )





If someone dig anywhere a VIA C3 Nehemiah 1000Mhz one for me and I get the better/bigger polymers, I might be able to score the ultimate ZERO score   But the run probably took like 16 hours or even slightly more...


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## tkpenalty (May 3, 2007)

trodas said:


> I got score 6 3DMarks 2005 now!
> 
> Samxon caps rule! Now testing 4Mhz for core...
> 
> ...



Wow my 9200SE wasnt as crappy...

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL


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## trodas (May 3, 2007)

LoL, perhaps not  I still have a 9100...  

Neverless you have to get into great lenghts of work to make THIS kind of score 

And I got ideas how to get lower and I mean NOTABLY lower, but... I just need another caps upgrade and the VIA C3 Nehemiah 1000Mhz one :shadedshu
Then I can attack the magic barrier - numero ZERO


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