Since Poczta Polska has failed me ONCE AGAIN and I couldn’t finish a project I was cooking up for quite a few weeks now I had to come up with a backup project. Luckily I came across a thrown out Xiaomi Mi Box while I was taking the trash out. As a bonus I got an AMD Radeon HD7970 with invisible artifacts. Pretty good combo, if I do say so myself.
Case 1: Not-so-ragefixing
Mi box – semi turns on – light from digital audio out was on, however power LED wasn’t lit up, as well as there was no display.
What’s inside? A highly integrated solution – essentially a smartphone without GSM capabilities.
I was poking around when I noticed a buck converter that had no output. Unfortunately there was absolutely no schematics, diagrams nor even a datasheet for this part, so this project has to end right here. I have no clue what this part is so that I could substitute it or even attach by bench PSU just to test it. Unfortunately without a second working unit this thing is unfixable.
Case 2: Radeon
I got it as a parts-only GPU – displayed artifacts. However, when I hooked it up:
A 50MB VRAM test showed no bad ICs, same with output – crystal clear, no signs of artifacts. GPU was obviously working just fine.
A 3GB GPU. Virtually useless by today’s standards (ekhm… ekhm… GOW with 6GB minimal limit).
Everything was fine and dandy untill I noticed artifacts in Windows 7. Back to the DMGG.py then:
There are errors, however look at “Total errors count: 512….”. As I was using this GPU as a display adapter framebuffer has messed a bit with this test, hence 512 errors in this log. Time to call for a linux machine.
So far so good, GPU is recognized and not artifacting.
Driver has loaded, so VRAM is fine. Linux is quite a bit more tolerant than Windows, but it still wouldn’t load drivers if VRAM was in any shape or form broken.
Later I also loaded a Win11 machine, tested it in furmark and it also didn’t artifact, so I guess Win7 was a false alarm.
Thanks for reading!