Good day.
I do have a problem with my gpu (geforce gt8500) which apparently blew a capacitor few months ago, I didn't notice it even go ill but once I started TF2 up and noticed that my fps had dropped, and it giving me a bsod later when I had played for a while. Opened up the tower, dusted it a bit and noticed what had happened. 1 blown. So I discussed with my father and bought a new replacement capacitor, of course with same voltage and capacitance.
With a horrible soldering iron then we attempted to solder this thing onto my gpu. With correct polarities I might add.
I popped my gpu back into tower and started the whole thing up. Only to get a display error on monitor and 1 long and 3 short beeps coming from tower, which with my bios should mean missing video card.
Sent this tower to some IT guy my father knows and he sends it back with some replacement gpu (ati X1550) and my old gpu to stick on the wall for good memories. He couldn't tell what was wrong with it. He did think it had something to do with soldering (obviously).
Now it wasn't that much of a problem at first. The x1550 proved capable with all things my old gpu could do. But yet it isn't the same. I think 2 months have passed and I start to see why this card is subordinate compared to 8500. So I picked in my stuff and found it. I put it on the table, took a few pictures. And here I am asking for your help / ideas.
Also I'd like to say that I'm not going to upgrade. As I am not from the richest of families, and I know there's no point in buying a better gpu alone, for my tower and all the components inside have been there since 2007. I'd have to buy a new psu for sure. Also I care not for better graphics but I want my games to be playable. And with x1550 they aren't - while my 8500 wasn't that much better it played games at normal fps (for most part).
I want to believe that the problem is in soldering but damn. Any idea would be helpful at the moment.
Pictures if these can help you.
[quote]
[img]http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/439/93100654.jpg[/img]
This black tall one is replacement one
[Img]http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg821/scaled.php?server=821&filename=29322535.jpg&res=medium[/img]
[/quote]
Stuff might have fucked up down the road when it blew.
Do you have a good multimeter?
You could have damaged the board when you put on the new capacitor. Either the contacts for said capacitor or something nearby. Also it looks like the solder connection are cold or at least improperly formed.
Those solder joints look terrible, it's no surprise the GPU doesn't work. It looks like you applied too much heat to the leads on the front capacitor on the second pic and lifted a trace. If that's the case, no amount of soldering is going to fix the card.
If you're lucky, you can find a nearby trace that the capacitor is in circuit with and make a wire jump.
But the first order of business is to get a new soldering iron, Radioshack has them for like $15-20.
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