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I say try it. If you're unsatisfied with the cooling performance, swap it out. That is assuming this is a normal gaming PC application. If this is some sort of mission or life safety critical system, where the consequences of a failure are in some way catastrophic, you should probably use a...

The shutoff mechanism is the easy part. It's the accurate monitoring of the pin temperature (the temperature we really care about), as opposed to the temperature of the plastic housing, that's hard. This is why all the attempts at doing this, like we've seen shown at Computex last week, or...

Speaking only for myself, I'm looking forward to the expansion. I'd be more excited about a Witcher 4, though.

What do you get if you measure the 12V power input to the motherboard while it's working? Does it droop below 12V?

Given that it failed slowly, I assume it got less and less stable until it just continuously crashes? I've bought and repaired a few. They do sell occasionally, particularly if they're interesting models, like the old dual GPU cards, or high end overclocking boards. Right now, what you see is...

What voltage do you have on that pin from the power supply, to the power supply's ground? With it unplugged, do you have 5v?

What resistance do you have between the 5VSB pin and ground? Like, in actual ohms.

What do you get if you test resistance across the 12V input pins on CPU power header? What about the +12V pins on the 24 pin connector, or any other supplemental power connectors, like a six or eight pin down near the PCI-E slots?

What happens when you hit the power button? Does it power up, but not POST? Or does it turn on for just a second, and then immediately shut off?

You should be able to use ATIFlash to write the proper bios back on it. You'll need to plug it into a system with another, working graphics card, boot up with the display plugged into the working on, and then use ATIFlash to write the proper BIOS onto it. It's been a while, but I think this...

There's enough story if they mainly focused on the Zero Dawn time period. But yeah, I don't see it ending well if they tried to make a whole movie of far future robot dinosaurs. In fact, I think they could leave that out entirely, and make it all about Faro and Sobeck, and how Faro's...

What that says to me is that there's room for a 5080 Ti, which is how it used to be back in the good old days.

This is what I was thinking. 200FPS sounds like overkill for most games, but really competitive players demonstrate an advantage to even higher framerates. I've heard that the best players turn off textures and run a lower resolution, even. IMHO, if you don't already have one, the next...

You don't always get a violent pop or smell or anything when a FET goes bad. Sometimes the FET just melts inside, creates the short, and the system shuts down. When it initially failed, did the system actually shut down completely, or did you just get a black screen?

If the system shut down completely when it went bad, and removing the graphics card causes it behave normally, then you can be about 90% sure that the problem is the graphics card. Given the symptoms, I would suspect a failure of a high-side power FET in one of the voltage regulators. You can...

Have you confirmed that the water block is making solid contact with the GPU silicon?

I would think this would be more about preference than any objective ranking. I prefer Cherry MX blue switches and a numpad for my professional use (mostly programming, a little CAD), but others might like something else. The type of switches and general form factor are really the big...

I don't think the 3.3V rail would ever connect to the GPU directly. I could be wrong, but IIRC, on these GCN cards, there are three voltages that actually do connect to the GPU, and they're all 1.5V or less, with regulators on the board for each one. I'm thinking this is the result of a...

First, do not "reflow" this card, assuming that by "reflow" you mean put it in a domestic oven. That's a good way to turn a working card into a dead one. The worst case scenario here is that you graft some case fans onto this thing. What I would do is get out an ohm meter and start probing...

I’d have it repaired. Did they say what’s actually wrong with it?

The [H]ard way, obviously. The cleanest way to deal with this would be to desolder the connector. It'd be pretty easy to do with a hot air station, but you could probably use a regular soldering iron and coax it off of there. Once you hand the mangled connector off, for bonus points, you...

This sounds to me like a BGA failure, or damage to the board. It's also possible that it's something like a cracked solder joint on some other component, but if it's intermittent, or it works if you press on certain components, it's probably something mechanical that's failed.

Are any of the fan blades dirty? It's probably a combination of worn bearings and an imbalance in the fan blades. You can try cleaning them, but the real fix is probably to replace the fan harness with a new one.

What was the result of removing the low side FET? Did that clear your short to ground? Removing the coils might help. That effectively breaks the circuit in half - you've got the VRM half on one side, and the logic side on the other. You can then check each side for a short separately, and...

I'd imagine resistance on the coils should be around 30 ohms, but I can't remember ever having measured a 500 series card. I've got one at home I can check later, if you need me to.

What test did you do? Just measuring the resistance to ground on the coils? The software tests such as using TSserver are more relevant for a card that sorta-kinda works.

Yes. BGA = ball grid array. This is the type of solder technology that's used to attach the GPU and memory chips, with a grid of tiny solder balls on the underside. It's pretty common in older electronics for the solder joints to crack, or pull the pads off of the board, and the behavior...

Probably a BGA failure of some kind, but another possibility is something like a faulty bootstrap capacitor which is causing one of the phases to run super hot. You'd check for that with a thermal camera, freeze spray, etc. If you've got one phase that's way hotter than the others...

I really meant just the low side FETs, which are the ones that stand between the switch node and ground in the buck converter (you should really read about how a buck converter works before you do anything else). Each "phase" in the VRM has two transistors - a high side, which switches the 12V...

In this situation, that's likely to make things worse, and not better. Hardgfg's card has experienced a failure in the memory VRM that's created a fairly high resistance short to ground. This isn't an issue of the BGA solder joints failing - something else on the board has most likely melted...

Generally yes, but it doesn't always work, especially when the short is still fairly high in resistance, as yours is, and thus doesn't flow much current. The best tools to locate the warm spots on the board are, in this order: 1. a thermal camera 2. freeze spray 3. isopropanol 4. your lips 5...

How are you supplying the voltage? A bench power supply should tell you how much current it's applying. Did you try the isopropanol technique I mentioned? Watching the isopropanol evaporating is probably the best way, other than a thermal camera or freeze spray. Using your fingers won't...

Try putting some isopropanol on some of the suspect components, such as the FETs and the GPU die, and then turn the power supply on and leave it on for a couple of minutes, while you watch to see where the alcohol evaporates the fastest. If you still don't see anything, start checking other...

How are you checking for changes in temperature?

No. You're injecting voltage into the memory power plane - it will reach all of those components, and then flow (mostly) through the one with the lowest resistance, dissipating energy as heat. No need to do anything other than solder a wire to the coil terminal, supply 1.0V, and look for...

You can try to start with just 1-2A if you want, but I would guess that you won't get enough temperature delta with less than 10A to be able to tell, unless you have a really good thermal camera. You should not put a heatsink on the GPU - you actually want to see the die itself, so you can see...

You can solder the wire to either end of any of the coils on that VRM. It doesn't really matter which end, or which one you choose, since they're all wired up together, and the coils don't have a meaningful effect if you're supplying a constant voltage. Obviously, the other end of the wire...

Correct. You want to inject current into the coil, basically replacing the functioning VRM with your lab power supply, so you can use whatever means you have available to see where all that energy is going.

I giggled at 'Wanptek.' Sounds like it's named after the sad trombone riff. He said he's in Europe, and that stuff there is a lot more expensive, so he may not have the same number of options we have in the states, but I have a similar unit that I've used with success to fix some graphics...

There are a few options: * Perform a visual inspection and see if you can see physical damage to any components * Guess what might be wrong and start removing parts until the short is cleared. Be aware that if you remove any semiconductors, you will likely need to replace them with new ones...