Well, I think the subject says it all.
Took my GF3 out last night to revamp the cooling units on the core and the memory. The memory sinks came off with a bit of a struggle but without too many problems. The core was a different matter however.
Placed a Golden Orb on it a few months back and held it in place with two small drops of Thermal Epoxy on two corners and AS3 in the center. Went to pull the core off and it dang thing was welded on! While trying to get a knife between the core and the Orb, the knife slipped and off poped a surface mounted resistor
(found the resistor later in the AS3 that was left over from the core)
Roommate got the orb off (after using brute force with hunting knife
) and managed to resolder the surface mount back on but no go. Machines come back with BIOS beeps indicating no video found.
Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo....
Ordered a Radeon 9700 Pro and hope that I dont loose my job in the next few months
Side question: does any one happen to have the scimatics for the GF3 reference design? If I could find out what that surface mount is and its specifications, I could possibly save the card from becoming part of my computer graveyard.....