TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[Trekkie4]

Yee I finally got a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra!

...well, at least this is what I thought until I saw it

View attachment 247499View attachment 247500

This thing was watercooled, delidded and caught fire at some point of his life

...after some serious amount of IPA and paper towels I managed to clean it at this level

View attachment 247501
View attachment 247502

The previous owner sold me the card in a set (MB/CPU/RAM/VGA) and at first he was sure the system booted some times ago, but when we discovered the barbecue he was not so much sure

Anyways, what do you think?
Should I try to see if the card is able to POST before replacing the roasted components? Any idea if those components are vital for a POST / no load?
Is it even possible that this thing is not dead after part of the power delivery exploded?
(btw Cxxx stands for capacitor?)

Kinda reminds me of that song "Humpty Dumpty" ... Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again"

 

[DR4G00N]

Yee I finally got a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra!

...well, at least this is what I thought until I saw it

This thing was watercooled, delidded and caught fire at some point of his life

...after some serious amount of IPA and paper towels I managed to clean it at this level


The previous owner sold me the card in a set (MB/CPU/RAM/VGA) and at first he was sure the system booted some times ago, but when we discovered the barbecue he was not so much sure

Anyways, what do you think?
Should I try to see if the card is able to POST before replacing the roasted components? Any idea if those components are vital for a POST / no load?
Is it even possible that this thing is not dead after part of the power delivery exploded?
(btw Cxxx stands for capacitor?)

They just look like input filtering caps and the pcb looks fine, so the vrm will probably still work for testing post assuming nothing else is shorted out.

 

[framebuffer]

Damn, that card has been tortured hard..

I'm not a pro in electronics but if all the broken components are changed, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. And AFAIK, yeah, Cxxx does stand for caps.

That's also what I think/hope, but I wonder why they failed in first place

Throw that away.

Kinda reminds me of that song "Humpty Dumpty" ... Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again"

They just look like input filtering caps and the pcb looks fine, so the vrm will probably still work for testing post assuming nothing else is shorted out.

That's the thing I was hoping to hear
any idea what should I search for to replace them? I'm not familiar with those components, I see "100", "10 + strange symbol", I guess those are some resistance parameters of some sort?

 

[Ruru]

That's the thing I was hoping to hear
any idea what should I search for to replace them? I'm not familiar with those components, I see "100", "10 + strange symbol", I guess those are some resistance parameters of some sort?

Is it a micro symbol (µ)?

 

[Mr.Scott]

When there is visible damage like that, chances are high that there's damage not visible.
Don't waste time or money on it.

 

[Ruru]

When there is visible damage like that, chances are high that there's damage not visible.
Don't waste time or money on it.

5950 Ultras sell for pretty high price, so I'd try to repair it if it's possible.

 

[DR4G00N]

That's the thing I was hoping to hear
any idea what should I search for to replace them? I'm not familiar with those components, I see "100", "10 + strange symbol", I guess those are some resistance parameters of some sort?

100uF 10V is what it means I'm pretty sure. Not sure what the input voltage on the VRM is, 5V? 12V?, maybe they were being run over spec and they went after a while. If it still works I would suggest replacing them all (including the ones that didn't blow) with 100uF 16V Tantalum caps instead just to be safe, make sure they're the same size too.

Pop it in a cheap board and see if it even turns on first though before you go spending money on a possibly dead card (the caps won't change whether it works or not).

 

[Trekkie4]

When there is visible damage like that, chances are high that there's damage not visible.
Don't waste time or money on it.

5950 Ultras sell for pretty high price, so I'd try to repair it if it's possible.

I'm with Mr. Scott on this one. Apart from the obvious (wasting time or money) he could easily damage the entire motherboard with that thing. Is it possible to fix it? Sure ... just not worth the risk IMO. We are talking huge amounts of highly precise soldering, testing & patching up the PCB where (& if) necessary.

 

[Ruru]

I'm with Mr. Scott on this one. Apart from the obvious (wasting time or money) he could easily damage the entire motherboard with that thing. Is it possible to fix it? Sure ... just not worth the risk IMO.

I'd try it in an useless crappy board, not in the main AGP system.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Anyways, what do you think?

That should be a doable repair, if you can source more of the same SMDs. I would totally do that. Minimal cost and effort and you'd have a very classic card once repaired.

When there is visible damage like that, chances are high that there's damage not visible.
Don't waste time or money on it.

This is one of those rare times we disagree. The time, cost and effort will be worth it if the repair works for such a rare classic card. Given the photos, it looks like those caps went off and didn't take anything else with them.

 

[Fouquin]

Interesting. An AMD K6-2+ can be modified to K6-3+ (aka enable the full 256k L2 instead of just 128k)

The discovery of this mod a few months ago was really good timing as I'd just managed to snag a load of K6-2+ chips. I managed to get one of the K6-2E+/570s to unlock to a K6-III+, and it is still stable at 450-533, with 540/550 technically stable but sometimes causing crashes. Neither my actual 533 or 550s managed to unlock with any stability.

 

[lexluthermiester]

The discovery of this mod a few months ago

The idiom "Better late than never!" rings true here.

 

[Fouquin]

The idiom "Better late than never!" rings true here.

Yep! Same with the resistor mod on the P5A 1.06s with the Rev.G chipset that apparently happened in 2017 and I completely missed. Combining the two takes you from a system stuck on K6-2 250nm to now being a K6-III+ capable system with much improved performance. ~18 years to fix the board bug, and 23 years to unlock cache. Gotta be very patient to get the most out of your parts.

 

[Mussels]

I fixed some content on the previous page, rather than delete posts and issue infractions.
Politics does not belong on TPU, it only ever leads to arguments and people leaving the forum, voluntarily or not.

 

[MachineLearning]

My Mach64... I pulled this out of my grandfather's old Gateway beige monstrosity. It was a system I received when I was younger and extremely dumb, as I ended up getting rid of most of the parts and didn't even keep the CPU... Ugh. I still kick myself often for all of the good tech I tossed when I was in that stage. This card and 64MB of Legend + VisionTek SDR is all that survived.

Any GPUs and CPUs < 2006 instantly become unknown territory for me. AM2 and mid-775 onward is my comfort zone. So, many people here will hopefully have more info than what I have above

 

[lexluthermiester]

My Mach64... I pulled this out of my grandfather's old Gateway beige monstrosity.

Now that was a 4MB version of the Mach64. Nice!

64MB of Legend + VisionTek SDR is all that survived.

Actually, that's 60ns EDO DRAM made in 1996.

https://www.datasheetarchive.com/HM5118165BJ6-datasheet.html

SDRAM didn't come around for a couple more years. Still, very nice find!

 

[Ruru]

Now that was a 4MB version of the Mach64. Nice!


Actually, that's 60ns EDO DRAM made in 1996.

https://www.datasheetarchive.com/HM5118165BJ6-datasheet.html

SDRAM didn't come around for a couple more years. Still, very nice find!

SDRAM in DIMM form came in 1997

 

[lexluthermiester]

SDRAM in DIMM form came in 1997

According to Wiki it says 1992, but in DIMM form I think you're right.

Synchronous dynamic random-access memory - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Ruru]

According to Wiki it says 1992, but in DIMM form I think you're right.

Synchronous dynamic random-access memory - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I think that the early forms were for specific use, just like N64 from 1996 uses RDRAM but desktop RIMMs came three years later.

 

[Trekkie4]

I too, like puppies and kittens

Wish I could "like" my own post, kudos to admin for ingenuity

So ... speaking of damaged hardware components let me ask you this - did any of you ever had a situation where the certain component (dial-up modem in my case) would keep the Power LED turned on even when the system is shut down? Yes, it would turn off upon shutting down but then maybe half the second later it would turn on again & remain powered up indefinitely.

Obviously, I didn't realize what was the problem & was even about to take the entire motherboard out when I removed, unplugged the modem & power LED suddenly turned itself off... Weird!

 

[DR4G00N]

No, but I did have a Gigabyte X58A-OC motherboard that would trip the rooms circuit breaker when running multiple high power gpu's. No idea how it would do that but it did.
Swapped in my X58 Classified 4-Way and it stopped doing it.

 

[Trekkie4]

No, but I did have a Gigabyte X58A-OC motherboard that would trip the rooms circuit breaker when running multiple high power gpu's. No idea how it would do that but it did.
Swapped in my X58 Classified 4-Way and it stopped doing it.

Hmm... Are you sure that it's not a PSU related issue? Mine on the other hand definitely seems motherboard related. Fortunately (from what I can tell) there's no permanent damage ... as soon as I removed the modem, everything went back to normal.

Edit
And another thing ... could someone please explain me what's the difference between nVidia FX5600 & nVidia FX5600 XT? I tried comparing the specs of the two cards but alas couldn't find anything for "XT" series.

 

[Apocalypsee]

What do people think of this. Retro Beige Dell Optiplex GX1 Windows 98, P3 450 CPU, 64MB Ram, Floppy, USB
Updated to include USB compatibilty with drives, pen drives, keyboards and mice etc.
A rare and sought after retro Dell PC. This Optiplex GX1 is built for Windows 95/98 from scratch and has a fresh install of 98 SE, 64MB ram, 30GB HDD, Crystal Soundcard and cleaned CD and floppy and a Slot 1 450Mhz Pentium 3 MMX Intel CPU. Perfect system for retro Windows 98 gaming, they don't come much better. Cleaned, serviced and ready to go. Updated so you can use USB drives, mice and other devices. Given the age, the system obviously has marks and yellowing consumate with age.
I will include a Windows 98 SE CD GPU: ATI Rage 3D As you can see it looks in good nick.Of course you don,t know until you try i It is 100 pounds make an offer 10 pounds shipping.Is that good value for the product?It does not look like any caps have blown.I suppose the thing to worry about is the Psu.Or i could try and get win98 on my thin client but that would be a big task for me.or i could get an XP PC and downgade it to Win 98.

Wow this made me remind of my old Optiplex GX100, my first 'proper' PC, with Celeron 600MHz socket 370, intel i810 graphics with 4MB VRAM, Creative 128 soundcard. If I found one, I want it. So many nostalgic memory on that PC. Especially Intel mediocre graphics driver with missing textures, white textures

 

[Ruru]

Wow this made me remind of my old Optiplex GX100, my first 'proper' PC, with Celeron 600MHz socket 370, intel i810 graphics with 4MB VRAM, Creative 128 soundcard. If I found one, I want it. So many nostalgic memory on that PC. Especially Intel mediocre graphics driver with missing textures, white textures

Soundblaster 128 was meh, just an Ensoniq card in disguise.

 

[framebuffer]

Hmm... Are you sure that it's not a PSU related issue? Mine on the other hand definitely seems motherboard related. Fortunately (from what I can tell) there's no permanent damage ... as soon as I removed the modem, everything went back to normal.

Edit
And another thing ... could someone please explain me what's the difference between nVidia FX5600 & nVidia FX5600 XT? I tried comparing the specs of the two cards but alas couldn't find anything for "XT" series.

NVIDIA NV31 GPU Specs

4 Pixel Shaders, 2 Vertex Shaders, 4 TMUs, 4 ROPs

www.techpowerup.com

XT should simply have lower freq.