- Joined
- Jul 6, 2008
- Messages
- 37 (0.01/day)
System Name | The El Cheapo! |
---|---|
Processor | AMD 5200+ Dual Core 2.7ghz AM2 |
Motherboard | Asus M2A-VM AM2 |
Cooling | 1x 120mm Case fans |
Memory | 4gb DDR2 800 |
Video Card(s) | Twintech 8800GT Bios flashed to 9800GT |
Storage | Western Digital 500gb |
Display(s) | CMV CT-722A |
Case | Piece of sheet metal |
Audio Device(s) | Realtek Low definition piece of crap |
Power Supply | X-Power 400w by Enermax, best PSU i've ever had |
Software | Windows Vista, Fedora Core, Unbuntu, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Gentoo |
Hiya all
this forum has given me so much help simply by existing, thought I'd throw something up someone might find useful.
edit: because its come to my attention fire is hot
DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRY ANYTHING YOU SEE ME DO, JUST BECAUSE I HAVEN'T CAUGHT FIRE YET, DOESN'T MEAN YOU WON'T
story time! (check bottom for TLDNR)
So I'm broke as hell, and my computer was last built new when you could comfortably build a high end gaming machine for $1500NZD or under these days high end graphics cards cost that alone here in NZ.
as a stop gap as I am saving to pay off all my debt so I can buy a house, I'm upgrading/keeping alive my grandpa of a machine using faulty parts found cheap off my local equiv of ebay(trademe here).
mainly graphics cards and repairing them, they tend not to last long, they are often well abused before I get em.
My current setup is:
4690k delidded, liquid metaled, resealed, lapped.
Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard
24gb o mixed DDR3
RX 470 4gb G1 Gaming(gigabyte)
only new part in the system, an FSP group 750w PSU
so, long story short, I brought the faulty RX 470 G1 gfx card(for $30) that had been used for mining in a humid shed, was covered in rust.
loaded it up, found it had the wrong and a corrupt bios at the same time, found the right one, flashed it, away it went tho to keep it stable I had to underclock it by 10mhz on both mem and core clock.
This one got me thru lockdown playing warzone, woot!
Then I started to get a ghost monitor issue one idle tuesday, this in itself isn't an issue, as I can set it to disabled, and ignore it, the issue was, it was coming and going serveral times every 10 seconds or so.
freezing the computer as it detected, loaded drivers for it, detected it was gone, unloaded, over and over and over, making the computer unusable.
so, after some hours mucking around and trouble shooting, I cranked up my phone and brought another faulty RX470, this time a sapphire nitro+ mining variant listed as faulty.
While I waited for that to arrive via post I decided to remove the display ports I don't use on this card as they were covered in corrosion and so was the PCB of the RX 470 G1 gaming, so I cleaned the PCB, ripped out the displayports(it has dvi and HDMI and if I ever get a monitor good enough to use displayport, I will upgrade to a better gfx card) cleaned the pcb and reinstalled.
Tested it, still the ghost monitor problem, after doing some reasearch apparently this was a reasonably common problem with this card.
at this point I was pissed off at it, so I set afterburner to stupidly high overclocks(that still remained stable) maxed the power slider, set furmark running in fullscreen and left for an hour to go have dinner with the firm thought in my mind of "screw you card if you're not going to work, burn".
Came back after dinner, found the ghost monitor was now a permanent feature, thats not a problem, set it to disable, and set windows to only display on display 2(the actual monitor) and did some testing, the card was now stable while overclocked! and not longer having the ghost monitor come and go, it was permanently there so thats a win.
High off this unexpected win my RX 470 mining edition had arrived, usually when I get a card, I pull it apart to clean all the fans/fins, check for missing components/messed with components and check for shorts to ground before I put it in my PC, this cards screws looked like they had never been touched(and they hadn't) and in my eagerness to have a backup RX 470 incase my main one played up again, I put it in my computer and tested it.
slight spark sound(so slight I wasn't sure), pc turned on, no display, got into windows(using intergrated gfx), no card showing in windows, or to the amdflash tool.
after some tinkering trying to get it to show and some repeated bootups and shutdowns I shrugged and put my old gfx card back in as I was going to work on the mining one later
as soon as I turned it on, full fan spin on the working card, no display, get into windows, the working one isn't showing up anymore.
Pissed and in a hurry, I had a look at the broken card closer, and spotted this:
Notice the blob of badly done solder all over the most likely blown 10A PCIE fuse
this card is shorted, whoever owned it bypassed the fuse, and it blew my main 16x PCIE slot.
no problem, I have a second 16x on my Z97-hd3 right? WRONG its a 4x with a 16x slot, and its gen2 not gen 3, and it disables all the PCIE1x slots when its active. and it bottlenecks a lonely RX 470.
I put my working RX 470 G1 into the second slot, tested that it did indeed work in that slot, and then also discovered a gfx card in the second slot covers all my SATA ports aswell...
so limited FPS and only 1 hard drive(I had 1 90 degree sata cable that could just barely be squashed under the card)
not ideal.
Alot of swearing and hunting for a new motherboard later, I discovered three things:
Z97 boards aren't sold new anymore
Z97 motherboards are hard to find
Z97 motherboards must have somehow turned into diamonds and gold while I wasn't paying attention because the price of them is 3x what they cost new.
after spending the night learning how to play OSRS on my old laptop of slowness, I got fed up and thought screw it, my Z97 is buggered now, it can't get much worse.
so, I Know the 16x PCIE slot is toast, and the 4x works, so the PCIE lanes aren't dead, so...time for some testing
after doing some probein around with my multimeter, I found the 16x pcie wasn't shorted to ground.
I looked up a PCIE pinout, found the 12v VCC+ pins, and checked them, low and behold, all the other PCIE ports on the board had continuity on the 12v VCC+ pins between each other(both the 12v VCC+ pins on the PCIE slot, and between pins on each slot aswell), but not my main 16x slot.
solution:
so after checking my 16x 12v VCC+ pins weren't shorted to ground(fairly important)
I figured since the fake arse 16x slot that is actually a 4x slot that also covers the sata ports pissed me off so much in my time of need, I'd pilfer its power rail.
DODGY FIX WITH SOME RANDOM WIRE I FOUND IN THE BOOT OF MY CAR
Could it have been done better? yes
is there a fuse for the VCC on the mobo for the 16x slot? probably
could I find said fuse? no
TLDNR some idiot bypassed a fuse on a gfx card, some other idiot put a card into his pc without checking first(me), blew the PCIE slots 12v VCC+, repaired it by pilfering from another slot.
and it works, very well indeed.
edit: sorry for the spelling/grammar mistakes, I'm a lazy typist.
this forum has given me so much help simply by existing, thought I'd throw something up someone might find useful.
edit: because its come to my attention fire is hot
DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRY ANYTHING YOU SEE ME DO, JUST BECAUSE I HAVEN'T CAUGHT FIRE YET, DOESN'T MEAN YOU WON'T
story time! (check bottom for TLDNR)
So I'm broke as hell, and my computer was last built new when you could comfortably build a high end gaming machine for $1500NZD or under these days high end graphics cards cost that alone here in NZ.
as a stop gap as I am saving to pay off all my debt so I can buy a house, I'm upgrading/keeping alive my grandpa of a machine using faulty parts found cheap off my local equiv of ebay(trademe here).
mainly graphics cards and repairing them, they tend not to last long, they are often well abused before I get em.
My current setup is:
4690k delidded, liquid metaled, resealed, lapped.
Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard
24gb o mixed DDR3
RX 470 4gb G1 Gaming(gigabyte)
only new part in the system, an FSP group 750w PSU
so, long story short, I brought the faulty RX 470 G1 gfx card(for $30) that had been used for mining in a humid shed, was covered in rust.
loaded it up, found it had the wrong and a corrupt bios at the same time, found the right one, flashed it, away it went tho to keep it stable I had to underclock it by 10mhz on both mem and core clock.
This one got me thru lockdown playing warzone, woot!
Then I started to get a ghost monitor issue one idle tuesday, this in itself isn't an issue, as I can set it to disabled, and ignore it, the issue was, it was coming and going serveral times every 10 seconds or so.
freezing the computer as it detected, loaded drivers for it, detected it was gone, unloaded, over and over and over, making the computer unusable.
so, after some hours mucking around and trouble shooting, I cranked up my phone and brought another faulty RX470, this time a sapphire nitro+ mining variant listed as faulty.
While I waited for that to arrive via post I decided to remove the display ports I don't use on this card as they were covered in corrosion and so was the PCB of the RX 470 G1 gaming, so I cleaned the PCB, ripped out the displayports(it has dvi and HDMI and if I ever get a monitor good enough to use displayport, I will upgrade to a better gfx card) cleaned the pcb and reinstalled.
Tested it, still the ghost monitor problem, after doing some reasearch apparently this was a reasonably common problem with this card.
at this point I was pissed off at it, so I set afterburner to stupidly high overclocks(that still remained stable) maxed the power slider, set furmark running in fullscreen and left for an hour to go have dinner with the firm thought in my mind of "screw you card if you're not going to work, burn".
Came back after dinner, found the ghost monitor was now a permanent feature, thats not a problem, set it to disable, and set windows to only display on display 2(the actual monitor) and did some testing, the card was now stable while overclocked! and not longer having the ghost monitor come and go, it was permanently there so thats a win.
High off this unexpected win my RX 470 mining edition had arrived, usually when I get a card, I pull it apart to clean all the fans/fins, check for missing components/messed with components and check for shorts to ground before I put it in my PC, this cards screws looked like they had never been touched(and they hadn't) and in my eagerness to have a backup RX 470 incase my main one played up again, I put it in my computer and tested it.
slight spark sound(so slight I wasn't sure), pc turned on, no display, got into windows(using intergrated gfx), no card showing in windows, or to the amdflash tool.
after some tinkering trying to get it to show and some repeated bootups and shutdowns I shrugged and put my old gfx card back in as I was going to work on the mining one later
as soon as I turned it on, full fan spin on the working card, no display, get into windows, the working one isn't showing up anymore.
Pissed and in a hurry, I had a look at the broken card closer, and spotted this:
Notice the blob of badly done solder all over the most likely blown 10A PCIE fuse
this card is shorted, whoever owned it bypassed the fuse, and it blew my main 16x PCIE slot.
no problem, I have a second 16x on my Z97-hd3 right? WRONG its a 4x with a 16x slot, and its gen2 not gen 3, and it disables all the PCIE1x slots when its active. and it bottlenecks a lonely RX 470.
I put my working RX 470 G1 into the second slot, tested that it did indeed work in that slot, and then also discovered a gfx card in the second slot covers all my SATA ports aswell...
so limited FPS and only 1 hard drive(I had 1 90 degree sata cable that could just barely be squashed under the card)
not ideal.
Alot of swearing and hunting for a new motherboard later, I discovered three things:
Z97 boards aren't sold new anymore
Z97 motherboards are hard to find
Z97 motherboards must have somehow turned into diamonds and gold while I wasn't paying attention because the price of them is 3x what they cost new.
after spending the night learning how to play OSRS on my old laptop of slowness, I got fed up and thought screw it, my Z97 is buggered now, it can't get much worse.
so, I Know the 16x PCIE slot is toast, and the 4x works, so the PCIE lanes aren't dead, so...time for some testing
after doing some probein around with my multimeter, I found the 16x pcie wasn't shorted to ground.
I looked up a PCIE pinout, found the 12v VCC+ pins, and checked them, low and behold, all the other PCIE ports on the board had continuity on the 12v VCC+ pins between each other(both the 12v VCC+ pins on the PCIE slot, and between pins on each slot aswell), but not my main 16x slot.
solution:
so after checking my 16x 12v VCC+ pins weren't shorted to ground(fairly important)
I figured since the fake arse 16x slot that is actually a 4x slot that also covers the sata ports pissed me off so much in my time of need, I'd pilfer its power rail.
DODGY FIX WITH SOME RANDOM WIRE I FOUND IN THE BOOT OF MY CAR
Could it have been done better? yes
is there a fuse for the VCC on the mobo for the 16x slot? probably
could I find said fuse? no
TLDNR some idiot bypassed a fuse on a gfx card, some other idiot put a card into his pc without checking first(me), blew the PCIE slots 12v VCC+, repaired it by pilfering from another slot.
and it works, very well indeed.
edit: sorry for the spelling/grammar mistakes, I'm a lazy typist.
Last edited: