XFX 6600GT AGP artifact problem.

[William Gaatjes]

Hi, years ago i bought an XFX 6600GT AGP. I modified it immediately by replacing the heatsink with a zalman aftermarket cooler such as this model :

But a few months ago, my good ol' 6600 gt started producing visual artifacts. Strange colors and weird ascii characters. I cleaned the card and the chips, re-applied cooling paste but to no prevail. The card still produces artifacts. I am thinking of resoldering the card on my work with hot air soldering equipment. Is there some other solution to get it up and running ? It is an AGP card and the old system still works fine(with exception of the GFX card of course) and is fast enough to just discard and throw away.

Anybody have some good advice to get it running again ? Or did the 6600GT GPU died on me ?
I would like to try to build an ubuntu system with it.

EDIT :

I should mention i already googled for this problem but those results did not really present a viable option.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I should note that i did not change any BIOS settings.

 

[William Gaatjes]

And i should mention the artifacts appear in 2D and at powerup during BIOS message and while windows is loading.

 

[blastingcap]

Hi, years ago i bought an XFX 6600GT AGP. I modified it immediately by replacing the heatsink with a zalman aftermarket cooler such as this model :

But a few months ago, my good ol' 6600 gt started producing visual artifacts. Strange colors and weird ascii characters. I cleaned the card and the chips, re-applied cooling paste but to no prevail. The card still produces artifacts. I am thinking of resoldering the card on my work with hot air soldering equipment. Is there some other solution to get it up and running ? It is an AGP card and the old system still works fine(with exception of the GFX card of course) and is fast enough to just discard and throw away.

Anybody have some good advice to get it running again ? Or did the 6600GT GPU died on me ?
I would like to try to build an ubuntu system with it.

EDIT :

I should mention i already googled for this problem but those results did not really present a viable option.

Reheating the solder might actually work based on stuff like http://www.overclock.net/t/529271/bake-your-graphics-card-in-the-oven-fix-it-worked but IIRC XFX back in the 6600 era had lifetime warranties, so you could just ask for a replacement assuming they have any AGP cards laying around still.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Reheating the solder might actually work based on stuff like http://www.overclock.net/t/529271/bake-your-graphics-card-in-the-oven-fix-it-worked but IIRC XFX back in the 6600 era had lifetime warranties, so you could just ask for a replacement assuming they have any AGP cards laying around still.

I do not know if i still have the receipt. It has been years.

 

[blastingcap]

I do not know if i still have the receipt. It has been years.

They might not need one. Can't hurt to ask.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I will resolder the gfx card after my vacation. I think that is the best option that i have. Thank you.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Any reason you're still hanging on to an AGP card?

 

[gbeirn]

Artifacting is almost always failing RAM

 

[William Gaatjes]

Any reason you're still hanging on to an AGP card?

It is an old agp based system but it has good specifications. 2,1GHZ AMD Barton with 512KB cache . 1GB DDR ram. dual channel, Nforce2. I think i have an old radeon 9600xt card lying around somewhere. But that would really be a step backwards when it comes to graphic computation power. I would really find it a shame to discard of the material. It would be great to use this pc as a test machine for software or run ubuntu on it.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Now that i thought about it, i do remember i overclocked it a bit (5% to 10%). Is it possible to force it into a lower MEM/GPU clock ? Or does this not matter when it already fails at the powerup /bios /post screen ?

 

[NTMBK]

Where are you based, William? I have an AGP HD4670 that needs to go to a good home, if you need a replacement card.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Where are you based, William? I have an AGP HD4670 that needs to go to a good home, if you need a replacement card.

I live in the Netherlands.
Thank you for the offer, i will think about it.

But i have a plan i am going to try first.
I am first going to use some cold spray to find out which memory chip is bad.
I noticed that sometimes it works for a few seconds at boot up, then the artifacts appear. Perhaps it is temperature related.
If that works, i will use cold spray in windows to get it running and lower the clocks with riva tuner. If that helps, i am happy.

If it does not help, i will resolder the board with a hot air soldering tool.
If that fails me, i have tried at least everything i can do.
I do not think i can get those particular ram chips anyway.

 

[FalseChristian]

I'm sure you could grab a GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB AGP for, what?, like $10?

 

[NTMBK]

Well, I live in the UK, so shipping to the continent would not be too expensive. Drop me a PM if your repairs don't work out.

 

[pipm1]

I had a 6800 AGP & when it originally died I bought a 4650 AGP. Some time later I tried to revive the 6800 AGP after finding stuff online about fixing them by kind of resoldering them via baking in an oven - I didn't want to stink out the oven so I used an old iron outside to heat it up. It seemed to fix the issue & made the card work again but when I went back to try the card again later it was dead.

I have this website bookmarked for video card problems, don't know if it'll help you - I don't see a screenshot of ASCII garbage; http://www.playtool.com/pages/artifacts/artifacts.html

My system is Nforce2 also; I never had much joy overclocking it, but it still manages to play Starcraft2 & Crysis & TF2.

 

[William Gaatjes]

That is an interesting website, thank you.
The errors i see on the screen, seem to be a combination of gpu artifacts and memory artifacts and bus artifacts.
I could try resetting the bios settings of the MB. This may lower the AGP settings. I think i have either AGP x4 or x8 setting. That way i can rule out the bus settings possibility.