Video Card Ugliness
I have this fairly nice setup for my home office, since I work from home more or less exclusively. I like to play the occasional PC game, so I have a reasonable video card setup. I had two eVGA 7600GT video cards in an SLI configuration. Well, this all turned sour last Saturday. I pulled out the cards and…
Can you see the problem? Here’s a pair of close-ups:
So I ordered an upgrade (no SLI this time around, since I’m having to pay for it myself) of a PNY 8800GT. It seems pretty nice and was only about $150 after rebate from Newegg. I was tempted to go back to eVGA, but I had a pretty bad experience with them when I was setting this box up. I decided to branch out.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:39 am
Unbelievable – my 7600 GT failed in exactly the same way! Not only that, but the *identical* capacitors were blown in the same order! Crazy.
So I got a new 9800GT on sale at Newegg. Okay, since I was going to throw out the old 7600 anyway, I thought why not — let\’s try to remove the old capacitors and solder in new ones. I found some identical capacitors at a local electronics store, and replaced the 4 blown ones ($8), held my breath, and powered the PC up. It worked! One less video card in the landfill. I took some pictures of the ordeal, but not sure how to post them here.
This is a late comment, but thought I\’d share my experiences in case someone else comes across this: that this is common, and also fixable if you can fire up a soldering gun.