HIS HD 3870 IceQ3 Turbo Needs Love

[Shotky]

Hi everybody, I'm currently holding this HIS HD 3870 IceQ3 Turbo that bought a couple of weeks back
 supposedly fully working no problems at all, bought it 30min after I saw it, was an impulse buy haha. So got home to notice the shaft of the cooler was broken (fix that no problemo at all) the shaft was made out of ceramic. Blown away when I saw that, pretty cool tho. So I pull out my thermal cam, plug the card, fire it up, everything on spec, windows loading, got to my desk and not so slowly starts to appear green and blue vertical lines, all evenly space out and got a bit freak out cuz the GPU temps where climbing quick from what I could see in the thermal cam, and turn of the pc immediately or the PC crashed I don't remember, the crashed blue screen said *VIDEO TDR FAILURE* but yeah I don't got much info from that error code. So I proceeded to dismantle the GPU, had couple of signs of being drop or was subtly abuse IDK, one coil has the top broken nothing to worrie about, one thermal pad missing from one memory module, awful how it was ''refresh''… Gross
 So, now is refresh, how it should be, plug it in and got to gpu-z to se the temps climbing to 60°C and the blower there chilling at idk 500rpm super slow, never ramp up the speed of the blower… So next I proceeded after running DDU install the drivers and just when the installer is finishing; you know the part when the screen goes black and the resolution matches the resolution of the monitor… Well it just crashed to shit, and I know for fact that sing could be fix with a reflow.   Some time ago I bought a GTX 760 OC that did the exact same thing with the drivers, no lines tho, and I reflow the hell out of it, haha, and still working strong tho… but Now I want to trie to diagnose properly this card, not just throw flux and hot air everywhere and hope for the best... I really wanna get into in depth repairs, currently studying electronics by myself and I have a lot of computer parts that I want to repair. so yeah, didn't find too much info about this particular GPU showing this signs.
 I will respond to any question if I dismiss something.

I

[da na]

That's Windows 10 right? I have a HD 4870 x2, and the HD 4000 series and below is not supported on Windows 10. I also get weird lines on my screen, the drivers won't even install for me, and random BSODs if I put the card in, and this was a well treated card. It's a driver support issue not a broken card.

[BondiBlue]

That looks like a bad card to me, possibly bad RAM. Does the BIOS startup screen also show these weird lines?

4 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

That's Windows 10 right? I have a HD 4870 x2, and the HD 4000 series and below is not supported on Windows 10. I also get weird lines on my screen, the drivers won't even install for me, and random BSODs if I put the card in, and this was a well treated card. It's a driver support issue not a broken card.

No. Radeon HD 3000 series cards work just fine in Windows 10. I've run a 3870 in Windows 10 without issues, and one of my systems has a 3450 and Windows 10. I've also got some 4000 series cards that run Windows 10 just fine. 

[Shotky]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

That's Windows 10 right? I have a HD 4870 x2, and the HD 4000 series and below is not supported on Windows 10. I also get weird lines on my screen, the drivers won't even install for me, and random BSODs if I put the card in, and this was a well treated card. It's a driver support issue not a broken card.

Yes is win10, boy I really hope is that, but like you still have the lines even not running the card on win10? The line's bro, got me really worried.

[Shotky]

1 minute ago, BondiBlue said:

That looks like a bad card to me, possibly bad RAM. Does the BIOS startup screen also show these weird lines?

 

 

Definitely going to check that, one of my worries was a bad ram chip, when I saw one thermal pad missing from one.

[da na]

1 hour ago, Shotky said:

Yes is win10, boy I really hope is that, but like you still have the lines even not running the card on win10? The line's bro, got me really worried.

The lines only appear on the card in Windows. In the BIOS and during boot they are not visible, and on Windows 7 they do not appear.

[da na]

1 hour ago, BondiBlue said:

That looks like a bad card to me, possibly bad RAM. Does the BIOS startup screen also show these weird lines?

No. Radeon HD 3000 series cards work just fine in Windows 10. I've run a 3870 in Windows 10 without issues, and one of my systems has a 3450 and Windows 10. I've also got some 4000 series cards that run Windows 10 just fine. 

So, the drivers install fine with no tweaking? The legacy Catalyst drivers are only supported up to 8.1 AFAIK. 

[BondiBlue]

7 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

So, the drivers install fine with no tweaking? The legacy Catalyst drivers are only supported up to 8.1 AFAIK. 

Yes, and that's been my experience across several versions of Windows 10 ranging from build 10240 in 2015 to 1909 last year. The only time I ever had any issues was with a screwed up copy of Windows Server 2016, and that wasn't the fault of the driver. 

[da na]

4 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Yes, and that's been my experience across several versions of Windows 10 ranging from build 10240 in 2015 to 1909 last year. The only time I ever had any issues was with a screwed up copy of Windows Server 2016, and that wasn't the fault of the driver. 

Interesting. I'll try again tonight and see if I can get anything working... It could have possibly been a faulty card then.

[Shotky]

16 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

So, the drivers install fine with no tweaking? The legacy Catalyst drivers are only supported up to 8.1 AFAIK. 

Yes, I downloaded the drivers straight from the amd page.
And I'm gonna see if I can plug the card today and see if the lines appear on boot post, but I strongly think they don't, because I don't remember seen some like that the 3 times I booted up the card

[Shotky]

On 8/9/2021 at 7:32 PM, BondiBlue said:

That looks like a bad card to me, possibly bad RAM. Does the BIOS startup screen also show these weird lines?

 

Sorry for the delay but finally got time to tried to fix the card, and yes the lines appear on post and in bios, I cooked the card carefully too around 175°C (Lower that what it should be, I know) and the card was recognized by the drivers I previously installed, but the lines started to appear slowly wile the card starts to heat up, around 50°C the lines apear (I think tho) just like the first time y plug in the card, but now with better resolution ... Tried to install the drivers again, but it crashes again, and I didn't do a memory check yet...