Problem with GPU (bricked?)

[D1versity]

Hello guys!

 

So I've been having a problem that i will explain later on but first I'll give some context: (TLDR at the bottom)

 

My mom was in need of a gpu only as a display adapter, because she doesn't do anything graphically intensive, so we got her a Geforce 8400 gs that was gifted to us by a local computer shop. The thing had no fans, only a radiator and an empty fan slot. After a while, my mom started having problems with her screen being completely static and other problems, so I decided to give her another card I was planning to use in another project and started to diagnose the 8400.

I booted with the card in my "testbench" (celeron E5200, cheap motherboard I salvaged and 2x2GB sticks) and it seemed to work fine, I downloaded the drivers, restarted and launched MSI AB to check temperatures.

 

oh no

 

So the card was at 82 degrees idle, very bad of course but I wasnt expecting it to literally have a major crash after blinking the screen a few times. I went to the little workshop I have and added a fan to it, nothing fancy, but it would help.

Success! 40C° idle and 50C° on furmark after 15 minutes, seemed stable and great... But could it do more? I thought to myself, I opened MSI AB and the Heaven benchmark, raising the bars as much as possible. I was able to get the sliders up until the end and it was working fine, no crashes, nothing. After a while, the screen got stuck, the card was at a mild 52C° but it wouldn't move in any way. After restarting the pc I noticed a clear difference: 8bit color at 640x480.

 

Oof, it seems the card went into a safe state or something, so i started to dig checking what was going on, in device manager the card reported as "vgasave", so i uninstalled that, with all the drivers and reinstalled them. The only thing slightly different was that device manager says Windows stopped the card because it stopped working (Error: 43).

 

I tried: - DDU in safe mode

- Reinstalling the card

- Putting it in my main pc and installing the drivers

- DDUing it in my main pc

 

But nothing, it seems to be rendering it in some kind of software mode, and I see some interesting artifacts, as in I can sometimes see stripes in some colors.

 

MSI AB of course doesn't report it but i found that down in the sensors it said it's current core clock and memory clock were 465 and 266 respectively, which are the same as stock clocks, GPU-Z reports mem and core clocks as a big fat 0Mhz and Windows keeps avoiding the card.

 

So what's up?

 

Thanks for reading.

 

TLDR: Overclocked shitty card > shitty card gets into safe mode > windows disables it > cant get it back up.

[Applefreak]

So why is there no fan on it? I have a 8400 GS in my NAS for the occasional debug and it has a small 40mm smei clear fan on it. And yes even with the fan it get's up to 62 C warm, just a bad heatsink I guess.

[D1versity]

Just now, Applefreak said:

So why is there no fan on it? I have a 8400 GS in my NAS for the occasional debug and it has a small 40mm smei clear fan on it. And yes even with the fan it get's up to 62 C warm, just a bad heatsink I guess.

Yeah, it was pretty weird, it's also is a 256mb ddr2 variant, pretty odd. I feel like they removed the fan at some point, because it had the 2-pin connector

[Applefreak]

What I've done on mine is removing the heatsink and replacing the dried out thermal paste underneath (be careful when opening, those are those nasty pushpins). If yours would get back to displaying anythin, I would recommend that in addition get a small fan and place it on top, use the Linus method if you have to (cable ties).

[D1versity]

3 minutes ago, Applefreak said:

What I've done on mine is removing the heatsink and replacing the dried out thermal paste underneath (be careful when opening, those are those nasty pushpins). If yours would get back to displaying anythin, I would recommend that in addition get a small fan and place it on top, use the Linus method if you have to (cable ties).

Well, as I explained in the post, I already added a fan to it, with some screws and stuff, i haven't replaced the thermal paste as i don't have any atm and i cant go out to get some because of the quarantine. But temperature isn't the problem, even overclocked at full load it hit a max of 52C°, I don't think it'll change much to reapply the thermal paste

[Applefreak]

Ok, sry must have missed that. That is a 80 nm Chip with even thicker memory modules, those components should be overclocked in increments of 0.5 or less. So either you fried the video output controller (not intergrated into the GPU core) or the memory. Unless the internal heat melted some solder on the pcb as well. These old chips were really hard to cool and you would not overlock a lower end chip like that anyways.

 

I would assume it is somewhat bricked. Maybe let it sit for a month or so and try again, you never know with old parts like that, maybe after fully discharging it will fix itself, probably not though.

[D1versity]

3 minutes ago, Applefreak said:

Ok, sry must have missed that. That is a 80 nm Chip with even thicker memory modules, those components should be overclocked in increments of 0.5 or less. So either you fried the video output controller (not intergrated into the GPU core) or the memory. Unless the internal heat melted some solder on the pcb as well. These old chips were really hard to cool and you would not overlock a lower end chip like that anyways.

 

I would assume it is somewhat bricked. Maybe let it sit for a month or so and try again, you never know with old parts like that, maybe after fully discharging it will fix itself, probably not though.

Thanks! I will try checking if something is out of the ordinary, but one final thing, what's rendering my screen right now? The graphics card is supposedly disabled

[Applefreak]

Old graphics cards like that were 2D/3D accelerators. The 2D part is more robust and runs on a specific clock speed and voltage that cannot be changed, therefore should work as an output just fine.

[D1versity]

Just now, Applefreak said:

Old graphics cards like that were 2D/3D accelerators. The 2D part is more robust and runs on a specific clock speed and voltage that cannot be changed, therefore should work as an output just fine.

Interesting, so it still got afected a bit by something anyways because of the weird strip artifacts.

 

Thanks for the info!