The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Well, the newegg writeup looked very interesting - some of the pipes actually touch the cpu - that sounded good. There must be benchmarks around the internet. You mention it is running at 100% - but some loads are heavier than others I understand.

Just for testing purposes, Kevin, why don't you really stress it for an hour or two with something like linpak or prime, and tell us about your temps at that time - shouldn't really stress your northbridge I don't believe - or would it?

For sure that is amazing that a supposedly non-conductive cooling fluid would ruin your graphics card - I wonder why?

 

For the record, I don't know for 100% fact, that the 260 is dead. But given the pop sound I heard, and the video going to puke immediately after, I'm assuming (with good reason) that it's dead. I opened up the card, and can see nothing visibly wrong. But I'm nervous hooking up a dead component, for fear of it ruining the motherboard. Probably just a capacitor. But I can't find tell tale signs of the pop Perhaps it was heat escape... or perhaps it was the coolit itself popping. Perhaps the CPU overheated, causing the video signal to go to crap. I'll probably never know.

Prime 95 may heat things up more. X264 does seem to be better at finding instabilities though. It's the perfect OC tester I will humor the thread/s by running prime 95 in a while though. I'll even push it to 3.9Ghz.

 

Yeah if the rest of the system works bar the graphics card, with symptoms like that you know the card will be dead.

 

Unfortunately, I would bet money on it

 

It's not actually that good an idea, it tends to be less effective in practice.


Non-conductive fluid contains substances that prevent corrosion, galvanisation and algae. The dry residue from this can still cause severe problems for circuitry.

 

Some pretty technical stuff is going on in this thread.

Sam: "Non-conductive can still screw things up - and cooler pipes touching the cpu doesn't necessarily help."

DDP: "Let me have a look and I'll tell you which cap is blown."

Wow!

So you guys, if Kevin sees one cap that sticks up higher than the others, should he just swap it out and dare to give the graphics card another try? Could the card, if it were still bad, instantly blow his mobo - or would he have at least a few seconds to see if there is any display on bios post to turn the machine off with no damage?

 

I've watched youtube videos of circuit board repair. It is doable. Though I've never done it. And Capacitors are typical weak points from what I've read/seen.

As I said, I can't see anything visibly wrong. I looked for bulging caps, and areas that look inexplicably wrong. E.g. like something was missing, or broken. And of course, it could be microscopic. I have a fairly sharp eye. But my eyes don't like straining too hard LOL! I plan to look very sharply at it once more, before giving up on it. Perhaps even sell it for a dollar on ebay. I guarantee somebody would pick it up

 

Something very common is that companies release "re-cap" kits for motherboards and video cards that include all the capacitors needed to replace every one on the board. This is a major help for otherwise good boards with poor quality caps or in need of an upgrade to solid state caps. Ofc not every board is good enough or a good candidate for this, but some have been released over the years with amazing quality, performance and specs only to be let down by a bad batch of caps that blows under temperature.

Interestingly my GA-X38-DS4 blew two caps between the VRMs and CPU socket, and I got a re-cap kit for that. They were actually the same caps Gigabyte put on the boards in later revisions, so it's mfg correct too. That was about a year ago and it's been folding every day since then without a complaint. Anyone familiar with folding will know it's a very heavy load and probably the hardest endurance/stability test you can run on your PC.

Capacitors I find to be very easy, but I struggle with finer work due to my large hands and shaky nerves. My hands shake so bad when working with small parts, I've considered muscle relaxants. Likewise, when shooting at the range, I have a hard time using larger rifles without a gunrest.

 

I haven't checked the caps on my X38-DS4. Its age is starting to show on the onboard peripherals though - only 5 of the 6 audio jacks work, there's quite a lot of coil whine from the VRMs and the network adapter is useless to play games with if it's sending data, as transmitting more than a couple of MB/s increases the latency to 100+ms.

 

Oddly enough Sam, mine has been unspeakably tortured and used as a fileserver/secondary gaming rig it's whole life without a single issue. Everything works perfectly. No funny noises, perfect performance, plays online games with the best of them while still managing torrents in the background, etc. All the USB ports even work. Some of it might be due to mechanical wear. This PC hasn't really been to LANs and stays inone place indefinitely. My gaming rig is all in order as well but it stands to be said the hardware in it is much newer too.

Still can't believe I went the e6600, 680i, 8800GTX route once upon a time. I can't believe I spent so much on so little. I reflect back on the time since I started building PCs and it's staggering how much I still don't know. Sorry, just thinking out loud. I used to be such a newb. I'm not saying that stuff was bad, but I would've approached it a lot differently. The big issue was I hooked that $600 8800GTX up to a 1280 x 1024 monitor and thought "OH YEAH AWESOME". lol

 

Mine has been running 24/7 for the last 2 years now, and is 4 years old in April, so it's stood up fairly well (considering the longest-lived Asus board was not used 24/7, and only lasted 16 months). The board was actually faulty from new, however, as the second PCIe slot causes the PCI Express controller to drop out periodically if used. (That ultimately took me over a year to diagnose!). Common issue with Gigabytes it seems as the X48-DS5 exhibited it as well, but I RMA'ed that, now knowing how the issue presents itself. After a move to Asus turned out predictably with another RMA, third time lucky with the X48-DS4, which ran my quad crossfire setup for about 8 months before being replaced by the P55A-UD4.

 

Lol, talking about that board...

Had an almost (but not quite) complete loss of service on my internet connection for several hours. No problems on the internal network. Rebooted the routers, modem, switches, to no avail. ISP said they couldn't find a fault.
Rebooted that machine, and suddenly the internet problem is fixed.
It's definitely time for that NIC to go!

 

I'm beginning to think the pop I heard was the pump/cooler of the coolit. I can find absolutely nothing wrong with the GTX 260. If the pop I heard was the GPU, there would have to be a telltale sign. Since the video became garbled almost instantaneously though, the fluid either affected the GPU somehow, affected the northbridge perhaps, or the CPU overheated rapidly, due to heat not being removed(it actually is quite possible). A CPU overheat could manifest itself in different ways eh? The only way to know 100% is to plug in the 260, and see what happens :S

I compared the 260's board, to an image I found online. It looked virtually identical. As though my board was the one in the picture. Caps look good, Microcomponents look identical. I can find nothing burned, or missing.

 

Not burnt doesn't mean not broken. It's your call, but the symptoms you displayed to me suggest with almost certainty part of the card has been damaged, and I don't like plugging in known faulty hardware, for fear it may damage something else. I have had lots of failed faulty hardware, and very rarely is there ever a physical sign of trauma, not even in the more spectacular cases. Not even the Qtec PSU that set fire to one of my old systems showed any signs of being damaged on the inside.

 

Yah, I still wonder about the GPU. It got a serious douse of fluid. I imagine if the problem is serious enough:
It won't post
It beeps

And if it's something minor, I'll get garbled video signal, or no signal at all. It is tempting. But it's the only Motherboard I have at the moment LOL! I'd sure hate to sell it on ebay, always wondering if it was a fluke.

 

Yeah, then don't risk it, until you have a system you can afford to take down.

 

I prime95'd it LOL! After thirty minutes it reached 44C. I ramped up the exhaust fan to 1650Rpms to see if it would have an effect. No. In fact, during the entire stress test, it bounced around rather erratically. 43 - 46C. 46C did not last very long when it would hit that point. It seemed to average 44C overall. The northbridge hovered between 48 - 49C. Ambient temperature was 76F at start, and 77F at end(25C). I think 3.7Ghz is a nice happy medium. Though I'm sure I could go more. I guess we'll see what this summer will allow

 

Undoubtedly, warm summer temperatures make an enormous difference.