Rastalovich
New member
This is a copy of a thread I've made on another forum. I think it's all OC3D savy, if not a mod can edit it accordingly.
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At many technical places where people work, these days electrical waste gets separated so u end up with a mini bin with all kinds of scratched monitors, keyboards missing posts, pc components, cables - u get the idea.
(whilst we're on this subject, even if u don't work at a place that has these, be aware that many companies with technical departments have such bins - how u go about looking into those... I don't really want to know or advocate)
Anyway, I always look into these. U will find people dump whole pcs. Well there are sinks, chips - sometimes memory, cards, drives - who knows. All destined for the electrical shredder cos no1 knows their value to the weird amongst us. Servers that have failed, loads of secondary gear to be salvaged.
I've gotten loads of little things. Recently tho I saw a load of pci cards in anti-static bags. Rifled through the top 3 or so in the pile and they were editing cards that I already knew were a pita to install on anything. The company was no-more and they were indeed sh1t.
.. what's this ? A pcie graphics card with an XFX logo. Whilst still moist in the groinal region, I looked at the card and apart from some strange wiring on the back, it was obvious 2 caps had totally exploded. Goo oozing all over them.
.. caps are replaceable.
I neglected to take a pic of the card in it's broken state, probably as I was a little excited. Thing being, although it's not the best card in the world, I had a use for it in one of my pcs that would free-up a card that was too good for it.
Fortunately I know of some1 handy who is very good with a soldering iron. Part of his job and he's done it for decades.
B4 I'd come back from getting my coffee, he'd taken out the caps and replaced them with some as-good ones.
Ideally, the method would be to source the exact component that u can see is obviously faulty. But in this case the caps were as-good, even tho they were of a different type.
At this stage tho, u have replaced the faulty part, that doesn't always mean that the device is fixed. It could have been that something else had caused the caps to blow. So ofc u need to test the device. I chose to use an in-house pc (hey if it breaks/blows the pc, the company can eat it - or in our case the leasing company would eat it as part of their contract). Spookily it started up straight away and not just being happy with this I made sure it passed many runs of 3d benching tools to be sure. To output a basic vga signal doesn't require much work from the card. Something as simple as linux/dos running can be done without sweating.
So some pics:
Here u can see the 2 odd looking caps. Who cares what they look like ? Notably, they were like the cap to the right of them (cept with plenty of goo frothing from the top),
Excusing the poor focusing technique, I've obviously circled the pairs of legs for the new caps. Things like caps almost always get soldered with their legs sticking out the bottom. This is meant to make for an easy off-and-on process for replacement soldering of components. However in this case I was told there was something on the surface of the pcb that made soldering pretty difficult. My theory here is XFX coat the pcb with something that hinders ur approach.
A point of interest, nothing to do with anything I'd organized. But the card had already undertaken a mod of sorts. What we see here are 2x timing crystals that seem to have replaced 2x that were missing from the pcb surface. Whether this was done by XFX prior or some1 in-house, I couldn't say. I would highly doubt any1 I know has done this. (for 1, with the greatest of respect, it's too professional and the running green lines are... hard to say.. "tidy?" maybe) U can see the reference points they've taken. It could also have been Mac related - I really don't know.
Here's the finished product. As far as I'm aware to this point, a fully working XFX 7600GT 256m. Not the greatest card in the world. But it was 1stly free and 2ndly going to take the place of a card that's being wasted in it's current use (8800GT 512m).
Keep a keen eye on what technical stuff people throw out !
---------------
At many technical places where people work, these days electrical waste gets separated so u end up with a mini bin with all kinds of scratched monitors, keyboards missing posts, pc components, cables - u get the idea.
(whilst we're on this subject, even if u don't work at a place that has these, be aware that many companies with technical departments have such bins - how u go about looking into those... I don't really want to know or advocate)
Anyway, I always look into these. U will find people dump whole pcs. Well there are sinks, chips - sometimes memory, cards, drives - who knows. All destined for the electrical shredder cos no1 knows their value to the weird amongst us. Servers that have failed, loads of secondary gear to be salvaged.
I've gotten loads of little things. Recently tho I saw a load of pci cards in anti-static bags. Rifled through the top 3 or so in the pile and they were editing cards that I already knew were a pita to install on anything. The company was no-more and they were indeed sh1t.
.. what's this ? A pcie graphics card with an XFX logo. Whilst still moist in the groinal region, I looked at the card and apart from some strange wiring on the back, it was obvious 2 caps had totally exploded. Goo oozing all over them.
.. caps are replaceable.
I neglected to take a pic of the card in it's broken state, probably as I was a little excited. Thing being, although it's not the best card in the world, I had a use for it in one of my pcs that would free-up a card that was too good for it.
Fortunately I know of some1 handy who is very good with a soldering iron. Part of his job and he's done it for decades.
B4 I'd come back from getting my coffee, he'd taken out the caps and replaced them with some as-good ones.
Ideally, the method would be to source the exact component that u can see is obviously faulty. But in this case the caps were as-good, even tho they were of a different type.
At this stage tho, u have replaced the faulty part, that doesn't always mean that the device is fixed. It could have been that something else had caused the caps to blow. So ofc u need to test the device. I chose to use an in-house pc (hey if it breaks/blows the pc, the company can eat it - or in our case the leasing company would eat it as part of their contract). Spookily it started up straight away and not just being happy with this I made sure it passed many runs of 3d benching tools to be sure. To output a basic vga signal doesn't require much work from the card. Something as simple as linux/dos running can be done without sweating.
So some pics:
Here u can see the 2 odd looking caps. Who cares what they look like ? Notably, they were like the cap to the right of them (cept with plenty of goo frothing from the top),
Excusing the poor focusing technique, I've obviously circled the pairs of legs for the new caps. Things like caps almost always get soldered with their legs sticking out the bottom. This is meant to make for an easy off-and-on process for replacement soldering of components. However in this case I was told there was something on the surface of the pcb that made soldering pretty difficult. My theory here is XFX coat the pcb with something that hinders ur approach.
A point of interest, nothing to do with anything I'd organized. But the card had already undertaken a mod of sorts. What we see here are 2x timing crystals that seem to have replaced 2x that were missing from the pcb surface. Whether this was done by XFX prior or some1 in-house, I couldn't say. I would highly doubt any1 I know has done this. (for 1, with the greatest of respect, it's too professional and the running green lines are... hard to say.. "tidy?" maybe) U can see the reference points they've taken. It could also have been Mac related - I really don't know.
Here's the finished product. As far as I'm aware to this point, a fully working XFX 7600GT 256m. Not the greatest card in the world. But it was 1stly free and 2ndly going to take the place of a card that's being wasted in it's current use (8800GT 512m).
Keep a keen eye on what technical stuff people throw out !
Someones throwing them out and asked if our flat could use one... 
