The Stolen Eye

So I decided to test out the 8800 Ultra that I got from Mike (and that he got from Tenken).

It booted up just fine and after I loaded the newest Nvidia drivers, I verified the data in GPUz:



Now the real test! I fire up Furmark and run it at 1280x1024 16x AA. All seems well...until at about 50% it starts artifacting. The screen goes black, so I hit Esc and my desktop reappears. I figure I'll try it again, what the hell. Same thing happens, except this time it happens even faster.

I try to open up a game, and it just crashes to desktop after a minute or so.

Right now as I type I'm getting artifacting just scrolling down on the web page.

It's not even running that hot (which is what I thought the issue was in Mike's case). When running Furmark it was only getting to about 60 C.

Oh well, at least I tried. Time to put my GTX 260 back in.

sux.

try the oven trick...

preheat oven to 385 F

take off the heatsink and remove all TIM, plastic, unscrew the pci bracket and vga ports if possible. then put the card on a cookie sheet or something and prop it up with balls of foil aiming the card face down.

once oven is preheated, bake card for 8 minutes. pull out and let naturally cool for a good while.

this process is what i understand to be called 'reflowing' and may fix issues relating to cracked solders, which seem to plague nvidia cards from the 7000-series and newer. reflowing melts the solder to the point where it reforms its original shape and fills in cracks.

if the card is worthless and cant be RMA'ed, it's worth a shot

So putting it in the microwave wouldnt do anything then?