R9 290

[Flashie]

LEAKING CAPS (PCB)
I was cleaning a friends PC and he offered me a R9 290 to fix for him. It succumbed to overheating in his PC. I took the challenge, cleaned it and found some oily-fluid type liquid on the bottom side of some of these caps (picture 1).

 

What are these caps (The silver caps, not the SSC blocks). Why were they leaking fluid?

 

EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT (Buying)

I had then told the same friend I had fixed it and he had asked me to make an offer on it, being the beaut of a card it is. I currently have a GTX 970 in my main system but wouldnt mind having another card for my test PC, or evens to eventually sell - and I hear it near matches the 970's performance. I was offered the card for R1100 in my currency, which is roughly 6 times less than it would cost new here (R6000 - $416). Is it worth it to spend such money on it, or should i rather stick to buying and selling smaller cards like 560's and 550's?

 

DRIVER ISSUE

It powers my monitor through its HDMI, but it does not show up via Speccy, but then again i have NVidia GeForce drivers. Would that be the cause of it not showing up?

This is all that shows up in speccy (picture 2)

 

 

[Lotus]

Well, the R9 290 actually outperforms the GTX 970 on average now with current drivers. It's a question of overclocks though, and there are some great R9 290s out there. Honestly unless you physically replaced those leaking capacitors, I'd sell it while making sure the buyer knows what they're getting. I wouldn't do anything unethical.

[Flashie]

1 minute ago, Lotus said:

Well, the R9 290 actually outperforms the GTX 970 now with current drivers. It's a question of overclocks though. Honestly unless you physically replaced those leaking capacitors, I'd sell it while making sure the buyer knows what they're getting. I wouldn't do anything unethical.

Well, Me being the buyer and knowing about it because i fixed it, would you say it would be fair to buy it at the asking price of $76, for a second hand card thats already lost its warranty and already been "fried" from overheating

 

[Lotus]

49 minutes ago, Flashie said:

Well, Me being the buyer and knowing about it because i fixed it, would you say it would be fair to buy it at the asking price of $76, for a second hand card thats already lost its warranty and already been "fried" from overheating

 

Depends. Have the leaking caps been replaced? If not, I wouldn't touch it.

[zMeul]

these are solid caps and cannot leak as the dielectric is a polymer

 

what your friend found could possibly be oil from the thermal pads