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    Mystery of the missing resistors

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by moral hazard, May 16, 2010.

  1. moral hazard

    moral hazard Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Hi,

    One day I saw some 8600m GT mxm cards on ebay for $5, sold as "faulty". I thought I should buy them and bake them to life, to play around with the vram timings before I tried it on any better GPUs.

    So the cards arrived (2 of them), identical to each other. I tried them in my notebook, but they would not work. The notebook would not POST, no sounds, nothing.

    So I heated one up, many times and tested it over and over.
    This was not helping, so I gave up (at this point, the card was much darker than the one I left alone).


    After a few weeks, I looked again at both cards carefully, I noticed that there might have been something missing (the solder there looked like someone had taken something off the board).

    So I took a random resistor and soldered it in place. Turned on the notebook to test, it worked :D

    The notebook booted up, I ran GPUz and was surprised to find not an 8600m GT, but a 9500m GS.

    I wonder what happened to those cards, why they had one resistor taken off, then sold as "faulty"?

    *attached is the GPUz screenshot*
     

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    moral hazard, May 16, 2010
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  2. usapatriot

    usapatriot Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Maybe they were faulty due to the missing resistor?
     
    usapatriot, May 16, 2010
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  3. moral hazard

    moral hazard Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Yes, but why would 2 cards have that same strange problem, what crazy person went around ripping resistors off those boards (2 which I bought and the 5 or so that the seller had left)?

    It's really strange...
     
    moral hazard, May 16, 2010
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  4. sean473

    sean473 Notebook Prophet

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    that would be stupid but WTH.. those are 9500M GS not 8600M GT!
     
    sean473, May 16, 2010
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