Hands up if You think it’s time for another failed repair.
I see no hands in the air, good, I also don’t like when I fail to repair my projects. However, such is life here, some GPUs die, some live to see another day.
As You can see it’s an OEM GTX 680. Not that interesting.
What’s more interesting is MATS output.
2 ICs dead, 2 with broken solder joints. Not much to say besides “let’s fix that”.
At first nothing seems suspicious. But then…
… I saw this.
Very likely dead core. I usually don’t even look twice at GPUs with previous repair attempts, but I didn’t see anything wrong it until now.
Anyway, let’s replace the VRAM and see if I can aspire to the name of “N3Star, the magician”.
OK, so far so good.
Right. This is 100% dead core.
Actually this is the second one out of 2 GPU bundle I got. Guess what. They both have dead cores.
I know that getting dead core is just luck of the draw, but it’s really discouraging. Although it’s possible that in the future I could get a 680 with a good core it’s really unlikely, so this PCB is going to the spare parts bin for now.
Bonus
As a bonus I got a “dead” DFI Lanparty X48 T2RSB motherboard.
Jeez, what a catchy name.
It was supposed to be dead, but it booted just fine. I got it for next to free, so I guess it’s somebody’s loss.
Shame it’s not a Q9650 or Q9550, since X38/X48 can’t be modded to use Xeon CPUs, but I’ll take what I can get.
Anything wrong with the socket? NOPE.
VRM then? NOPE.
BTW, look at the amount of phases this board has. ONLY 6. I bet these get red hot when overclocking a C2Q. Now look at ASUS’ P5E Deluxe, Rampage Formula or Maximus formula. Even they have 8 phases.
At least It has a real X48 chipset.
That’s certainly an interesting heatsink. It splits in half in order to easily mount a water block. Pretty neat feature.
At this point this board has survived a 2 hour memtest86 test, so it’s ready for more in-depth testing.
Thanks for reading!