Plastic Surgery

Shmuckety

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 19, 2005
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After reading this thread: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1226166 I was intrigued. And I was wondering if anyone has tried to hac up their video cards. I know there are a lot of old school electronics geniuses out there that can do it, but have you?

Remove caps or mosfets to fix boards or try and transplant memory chips to make your card faster. Resoldering broken traces. Is it possible to replace memory? Anyone out there try anything experimental like this on any of their cards?
 
i've heard about this guy that took a 7600GT and soldered on a chip from a broken 7800 and managed to make the 7600 into a 7800, down know how he did it, or if its even true.
 
with enough, time, money, experience and a lot of patience, i bet it could be done...eventually.

No, it wouldn't, because you'd have to change every single component + the pcb, thus there wouldn't be anything left of the 6600.
 
Does anyone know if you could buy parts for these cards? In the other thread that I mentioned the op had a dead mofset. Could he get another one somewhere and replace it. Can you buy memory chips? You can probably transplant a memory chip to get faster memory performance, but I am sure it would take some mad soldering skills.
 
Very fun web page. I wish my soldering skills were better.

As for replacing little mosfets or caps, etc., my local Fry’s has a huge section of electronic bits, and if you can give them the serial number of the piece you are trying to replace, they can often find a suitable replacement part.

What I have also done in the past is to keep old components around to harvest their “organs”. I once got hold of a Radeon x1300 pro for super cheap, but its 27.000 crystal oscillator was broken off, and so the display wouldn’t work. I pulled the 27.000 oscillator off an old Radeon 7000le I had lying around, soldered it onto the x1300 pro, and got that to work too.

I’ve got a Radeon x1800xl AIW card here though that I just cannot get to work – I don’t see any obvious burned or broken parts. So sometimes I guess a card is just dead beyond the ability to repair.
 
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