Geforce 6200 PCI - Trying To Repair

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GiGaBiTe

2[H]4U
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Apr 26, 2013
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Paging Dr. RazorWind

Got a Geforce 6200 PCI that I bought with a lot of other cards from another member here, and it does this:



It had a 10 nF ceramic capacitor next to a memory module broken off, or I assume because the same row of caps is mirrored on another memory chip and the one in that position is 10 nF. So I replaced that, and replaced all of the electrolytics because they were bad. "Sam Young" and "OST" garbage.

As of now, it does the above. The vertical blue "jail bars" are static, but the horizontal white noise moves around like old analog TV static.

I wouldn't think the GPU ASIC would be bad, the Geforce 6200 was pretty reliable. Possibly a failed BGA joint or bad memory chip? Wanted to see what you think. I was leaning towards a bad memory chip because of the static jail bars, but I don't do video card repair often, so not sure.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Paging Dr. RazorWind

Got a Geforce 6200 PCI that I bought with a lot of other cards from another member here, and it does this:



It had a 10 nF ceramic capacitor next to a memory module broken off, or I assume because the same row of caps is mirrored on another memory chip and the one in that position is 10 nF. So I replaced that, and replaced all of the electrolytics because they were bad. "Sam Young" and "OST" garbage.

As of now, it does the above. The vertical blue "jail bars" are static, but the horizontal white noise moves around like old analog TV static.

I wouldn't think the GPU ASIC would be bad, the Geforce 6200 was pretty reliable. Possibly a failed BGA joint or bad memory chip? Wanted to see what you think. I was leaning towards a bad memory chip because of the static jail bars, but I don't do video card repair often, so not sure.
Click to expand...

I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot of insight into cards this old, but what happens if you boot with a second graphics card plugged in, to drive the monitor?

Given that there was some mechanical damage, it's possible that there are cracked or damaged capacitors elsewhere on the board that are allowing the memory voltage to sag below spec. Maybe take some voltage and resistance measurements and see if anything is obviously out of whack? You should have around 1.8V on the memory rail.

I'd guess you want something like 200-300 ohms to ground on the memory power rail, and maybe 20-100 on the core, but that's just guesses. Do you have another card of similar vintage and spec to get some sanity measurements from?
 
It'll show up as a second video card, the display is still garbled though.

I'll poke around the board and see what voltages I can read. Unfortunately don't have another Geforce 6200 PCI to compare it with, just an AGP card and it's very different layout wise.

There may be other shorted or dodgy components in that area, because the caps are reading 8-10 ohms, which seams rather unusual. There might be a hairline crack in some other MLCC cap nearby, I'll just have to look at the card more.
 
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