Hi guys, So I recently picked up a Gigabyte GTX660 2GB card off ebay, it arrived today and seems to be in fairly nice condition. The card was sold as faulty, what happens is the system won't post, it will power on and the RAM leds will all light up (normal before post) then quickly reboot after 30 seconds forever. No display, the fans spin though.. Just too be safe and be 1000% sure it's not just a bricked card, I removed the bios and flashed the latest bios to it, using my programmer (30/1/2013 iirc).. The capacitors seem a little fucked around the power management area of the PCB, bottom right in this photo, some seem to be pulled up slightly (looks like thew legs have come out of the cap) (ignore the arrow, photo off google) The more tired I get the more I think this is the problem haha The card is kind of acting like a card without the 6pin power connected... The card doesn't heat up either (well as far as I can tell with the heatsink on)
Maybe the power portion of the board is screwed up. Anyway, I would try the good old method of reflowing it. If that doesn't work, then it's trash.
Did you try the oven trick first? http://www.overclockers.com/the-oven-trick-repairing-your-broken-video-card-with-an-oven/
Um maybe because the seller sold it as faulty? If it was sold as working, return would be a valid reason but if it's already broken, returning it is just dumb.
The card is now functioning 100% The problem was, one decoupling capacitor had been torn from the back of the card and took a trace with it, as a result the die had no power. The second problem was another decoupling capacitor had also been broken off the back (top) of the PCB in the power management section (I believe it is directly related to the power management IC). This missing capacitor was causing the card to crash when it was run too hard, I had to underclock the card by -545mhz too even run heaven benchmark for longer than 5 seconds... The main 820 Uf caps for the VRM's looked suspect (physical damage) so I replaced them with low ESR 1000uf 10V caps in the meantime whilst I wait for the replacements.. I only have a 600W PSU so I'm going to be running the card off it's own 350W PSU just for fun
I paid $26 AUD + $16 shipping. About 1 hour before I fixed it completely I bid on a new card for about $150 AUD, luckily I fixed it because I got outbid haha I modded the bios and set the min fan speed to 24%,720rpm, this is the slowest the fans will spin (it's a OC'd Windforce card). Idle sits about 28~30c now with a max temp under full load (heaven benchmark) at just 55c.. if you are interested, I'm using no name $5 thermal paste from jaycar, it's a silver based one.
