Oh boy... what did I do to myself this time? Just a week or two ago we had a discussion here regarding DX10 era cards starting to become scarce and maybe having some niche use cases in the near future. Just a few days later, what do I find?
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Uhg... why why why. I could have just bought the two FX 5950 Ultras and been on my way, but no. These were sold as scrap, and I'm sure would have ended up as such eventually. There were even more 8800GT\9800GT cards and many more DX10-DX11 era cards without their coolers attached (and the seller said they were already thrown away), but the weight and size of this lot was getting absurd as it was, so I had to let them go.
They were apparently recently pulled from systems, so they have not been thrashing around in a scrap heap for a 15-20 years. I fully expected some damage, and there is some, but it isn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it'd be. I would say only 2-3 have enough SMD damage to be hopeless without a ton of work. Some have no SMD damage, others just have 1-3 components chipped off... I'm really hoping they're just EMI filters that aren't needed for operation. Until I start testing them out I have no idea if even a single one works, but I have a feeling that most of them will... even if they require a tiny bit of soldering work to get to that point. And I did specifically grab an extra 8800GTX that had been stripped of it's cooler, simply to use as a parts board for the others... or if it's in better shape, maybe just move one of the coolers onto it and use one of the others as a parts board.
What is in the lot:
3x MSI 8800GTX
2x EVGA 9800GTX+
4x PNY GTX 285
2x PNY 8800GTX
1x PNY 9800 GX2 (what a monster of a card! It's built like a solid metal brick. Absolutely no way these can get SMD damage!)
2x EVGA GTX 580
ASUS GTX 1050 2GB
2x Nvidia OEM Geforce FX 5950 Ultra (amazingly, at a quick glance they appear to be undamaged except for one bent cap on the top)
1x ATI All In Wonder 9700 Pro 128MB (looks like it got a bit hot at some point, not expecting it to work)
3x XFX 6800 XTreme 256MB (all three have bad caps but they are through-hole and shouldn't be hard to replace... one card is still in the plastic!)
Bare Cards:
1x PNY 8800GTX
1x Quadro FX 1000 (NV30GL; underclocked FX 5800)
1x Visiontek Geforce 3 (original)
1x All in Wonder 9700 Pro 128MB (completely different layout than the other, but marked the same)
1x ASUS 9980 Ultra FX 5950 Ultra (seems basically intact! Just needs cooling)
I probably won't go too crazy with this stuff right now, but I'll do some testing, mark which ones work, what repairs the others need and just tinker with them as time allows in the future. If the GTX 1050 works it will probably end up in some older Optiplex which I can resell locally as an entry level gaming PC and then pay off the entire cost of this lot... yay. 😁
Finally, I also got this in the mail today. Got it for a very fair price considering how scarce they are.
IBM\Tecmar ARPA PC sound card (~1989)
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I'm really looking forward to tinkering with it! I believe this is now the oldest PC sound card I own. Based on some discussions online I guess with the right drivers it will do something not entirely unlike Adlib and Sound Blaster emulation. Neat. 😁