PC Video Cards

[geartechbrandon]

Hello,

Been a long time lurker and watcher of EEVBlog. Recently I've wanted to make use of the piles of video cards I've accumulated after years of upgrading to delve deeper into cuda parallel processing. That project is fine and running but one of my Nvidia cards seems to be faulty as it causes the system to lock up.

I've isolated it and, thought I don't need it for the project, want to know more about what's going wrong. I would like to attempt to fix it and am wondering if anyone has any tips of diagnosing what the problem with it is. I've tried other forums for answers but the usual response is: buy a new one. That would be easy but what I want is to delve deep into what makes these cards work and how to keep them working. For instance if it's just a bad ram chip I could just pop it off and replace it.

The challenge and experience are more valuable to me than just having a working video card. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[Rasz]

my diagnosis: its broken

[jmoreland79]

You're talking about an embedded system with tens of thousands of lines of code running on hardware at extremely high frequencies.

You would need copious amounts of proprietary information as well as a custom test setup to properly diagnose what's wrong with it.

Other than checking for overheating and some low level tests of a few components, the best advice is to just buy a new one.

[videobruce]

There is also the fact these are grossly out of date. Too slow, limited memory, surely are useless for gaming. A card under $50 would outperform any of these probably.
You also didn't state the interface. PCI, AGP or PCI-E?