XFX GForce 9600GT Alpha Dog Edition from 2008\2009
This must be the first unboxing of an already used and dead item on a blog i guess.
My beloved graphic card that gave up the ghost a week ago because of a stucked fan. It's a Geforce 9600GT overclock edition. It performed nearly neck to neck to the geforce 9800GT, and i got as a RMA replacement of my former Geforce 7900GT (second hand) that decided to add funny artifacts all over the screen when i was playing something. So this 9600GT must be my first hand graphic card that died on me.
This is a picture taken in 2009 a minute after it was unboxed for the first time. Bellow you see a Geforce 3 ti500 (king of graphics back in 2001) as a size comparation.
Here i removed the cooler faceplate and you can see that the fan has been scratching for a while on it.
After pressing on it i could see that the fan bearing was all weared out as i could make the rotor bounce back and forth quite easly.
Ouch. Burned plastic near the fan. This puppy must have been heating quite a lot before dying.
I should remove the cooler now for further inspection. For this i had to remove four screws on the back of the card.
This card uses a black pcb and even so it has quite noticiable burn marks between the ram chips.
More of the same here. This card is completly unrepairable now.
Most voltage regulators were completly shorted although i measure them in circuit, so the circuitry around them could be shorted, or both. This justifies why the computer immediately shutted down when i tried to power it up. The PSU short-circuit protection kicked in just in time before anything else was damaged. Replacing the voltage regulators would be pretty futile as the memories are burned for sure and who knows what else is burned here. Besides each voltage regulator should be at least 1 or 2 euros, plus a new cooler, and the risk of it not working in the end make this repair not worthy at all. Out to the recycle bin you go! :(
Oh this is the key for the 3DMark Vantage that came with the card. It's yours!
This card shortlived as i would expect more years out of it. Why would you ask in a day and age where this sort of item becomes obsolete within 2 years? Because computer hardware remains with me as long as it works and it is still useful. I retired a Pentium 3 with a voodoo 5 one month ago as the motherboard and the memories were getting completly faulty giving me errors and all sort of weird symptoms.
Well now i have the perfect excuse to get a new graphic card :)
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