GTX280 not recognised by PC

[dicky96]

Hi guys
I'm looking at this GTX280

I don't have any shorts on the voltage rails (GPU reads around 0.6R but I guess these can read very low).

What are those two inductors near the 12V connectors - they read over 1M0 to ground and don't connect to the 12V rail but I don't see buck regulator IC near there either. I'm sure I should know what these are, from looking at other Geforce GPUs, but don't remember.

Basically the PC does not recognise there is a card inserted (beeps). None of the buck regulators seem to be running apart from one of the two near the PCIe 5V/12V connector which has 0.7V

This board does not seem to have high side / low side MOSFETS but has these shiny silver VT1165SF driver ICs - I could not find a datasheet i nthe usual places, about the closest thing I could find is this
http://www.datasheet8.cn/pdf/1008302...datasheet.html

The other thing I notice is the smaller of the two BGA appears to be damaged somehow. I thought it just had some gunge or something on it but it looks for all the world like someone splashed some molten solder on it, but it won't come off and I tried quite vigorously with a plastic spudger.

I don't know if tis is some defect of manufacture or engraving the markings but it looks horribly like the glass top of the BGA has melted or shattered at that spot. See Pic.

Has anyone ever seen that sort of thing on a BGA?

What does that BGA actually do? I can't find a datasheet for this one either, NV102-A2, Is it the interface between the GPU and the PCI bus, or involved with the GPU BIOS? If it is then it may explain why the graphics card does not detect or power up.

[SMDFlea]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

I think that molten solder you mention could be liquid metal, its horrible stuff.Are there any signs of it on the heatsink

[dicky96]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

Hi SMDFlea
No I didn't see any on the heatsink but I didn't look very close. Anyway I have this working now (to a point)

When I first tried it I had two 6 Pin 12V cables going the the GTX 280 because my PSU in the workshop only has 6 pin PCIe connectors

I had googled whether this is OK and it said that this sometimes works, with a 6 pin in the 8 way socket, but then 'sometimes works' suggests it also 'sometimes doesn't'

So I soldered a wire on the back of the 8 way socket to connect the two spare pins (0v and Sense) to Ground. Once I did that the card booted up windows 10 and gives a good picture

The PC is stable but the problem is that even once I have installed the Nvidea drivers, the PC says it is using Intel HD colour drivers. In the device manager it says I have a GTX 280 but it has an exclamation mark and says 'Windows stopped this device because it reported a problem (error 43)'.

I tried deleting and reinstalling drivers but no difference. I then googled the error 43 and found it is often caused by GPU temperature too high. This kinda makes sense because I got this from the flea market last weekend for €10 and I would assume there is something wrong with it. Also I noticed when I dismantled it that the grey heat sink compound on the GPU was dry and powdery.

I put some of this white heatsink compound on it when I reassembled it and it is certainly kicking out some heat from the cooling fan even when just running windows apps (no 3D) so you would assume the heat sink compound is doing it's job. Also I put a blob in the middle of the GPU like I would with a CPU, though I notice the original grey stuff was spread everywhere. Did I do wrong there? It seems to have spread out one i took it apart again.

Anyway the interesting thing is, I let the graphics card cool down for 20 mins, then tried it again and going to the device manager immediately windows starts, it still says the same error but the GPU fan is blowing quite cool. Also I notice on the GTX 280 it has an over temp indicating LED and that is not lighting.

Any ideas guys?

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

that nv102 chip is the nvidia hsi (high speed interconnect) chip meant for sli since this card can run 2-way or 3-way sli since it has two sli connectors on top of the card.

how high is that splash of solder or metal on the hsi chip? if its too high, it can prevent the heatsink plate from making good contact with the die, thus the chip overheats and it causes the video card to report problems with windows even if u dont use it in sli. try to figure out a way to see if that hsi chip is overheating as well... what tim does that hsi chip use on the heatsink anyway? thermal pad? or thermal paste?

lastly, this is a high-end card and often manufacturers put crappy cooling solutions on their video cards and they often overheat during load so it could be that the gpu is on its last legs. u can try reflowing the gpu and/or hsi chip if u want. not sure if that splash of metal or solder on the hsi chip indicates it had already been reflowed before unsuccessfully...

[dicky96]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

It looks like the thermal pad for the SLI chip had moved and was not cooling it, Or it could have fell off when I opened up the card. Anyway I put some heat sink compound instead but I still get that same error as soon as windows loads

I then tried to attach my thermo-couple meters near to the GPU and actually on the SLI chip. I taped them on with Kapton tape, then managed to reassemble the card and test it. It does not look like they are getting overly hot, but when I took it apart again it looks like the thermo-couple on the SLI BGA had moved a bit away from it so I can't 100% trust these results (see pic).

However I then tried running the card for a short time with the back plate removed (yes I know there is then no cooling to the video ram chips on the back of the board butI am hardly stress testing it here) after several minutes I used a laser thermometer and I can see directly behind the GPU is reading 44C and behind the SLI chip is reading 42C. The rear RAM chips were 41C.

This does very much agree with what my thermo-couples said so it suggests they probably were reading correctly. I honestly don't think either BGA is overheating

I think I will try reinstall windows 10 just in case something is screwed up (this test rig gets lots of different hardware plugged in to it) and maybe this is just a phantom fault?

Rich

[dicky96]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

Well it turns out my call over this possibly being a phantom fault was a good one.

I installed Windows 7, because my bootable USB with Windows 10 is at my house, and anyway, the latest Gigabyte drives for this card are Windows 7.

Once installed, Windows 7 was saying that the GPU was a GTX 280 and giving no errors. I then installed the Gigabyte drivers and everything looked good, so I ran Furmark GPU stress test - and it works

I'm getting 21.7FPS which I guess is about right for this card on a Core 2 Duo and it was stable.

So a happy ending to this one, thanks for the guidance and suggestions

Rich

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

Well it turns out my call over this possibly being a phantom fault was a good one.

I installed Windows 7, because my bootable USB with Windows 10 is at my house, and anyway, the latest Gigabyte drives for this card are Windows 7.

Once installed, Windows 7 was saying that the GPU was a GTX 280 and giving no errors. I then installed the Gigabyte drivers and everything looked good, so I ran Furmark GPU stress test - and it works

I'm getting 21.7FPS which I guess is about right for this card on a Core 2 Duo and it was stable.

So a happy ending to this one, thanks for the guidance and suggestions

Rich

Sounds like an .inf hack and/or driver hack, is possibly required for 10!

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

man, how many good hardware was trashed because winfock 10 didnt properly support the hardware?! no wonder we have an e-waste problem!

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

man, how many good hardware was trashed because winfock 10 didnt properly support the hardware?! no wonder we have an e-waste problem!

I don't have a confirmation of such a hardware ban being imminent, but I have fear of Microsoft banning Nvidia GPUs older than the GeForce 10 series and the same for Radeons older than the RX400 series.

It's possible that we'll be lucky for the GeForce GTX 900 series and the Radeon R9 series to still be supported by Windows 10!

[dicky96]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

@RJARRRPCGP
What would give you that fear? Also how would Microsoft even be able to BAN older GPUs, surely even if they tried surely there would be unofficial patches all over the net pretty quick?

[piernov]

Re: GTX280 not recognised by PC

They broke support for AGP and Geforce FX 5 (PCIe) at one point. (not sure if it still doesn't work in the newest versions though) GeForce 6 and Radeon X1000 were still working last time I checked, that's more than 15 years of support.
Transparency has been broken for a couple of versions for older GPUs but that can be disabled.
I don't see Microsoft explicitly dropping support for any GPU released in the last 10 years anytime soon, no reason to drop support for hardware that was supported with Windows 8, and even less to drop support for hardware at the time Windows 10 came out.
They do a really great job of still supporting drivers as complex as graphics driver that were only designed for Windows 7 (even Vista sometimes) in the latest release of Windows 10.