While I was mounting parts in the case I had a most stupid accident! I left one of the screws on the card. After turning the power on, I just saw one of the (I think) resistors go yellow and get fried. Now the GPU wont get initialised when I press the power button. Does this mean that the GPU is fryed or can it all just be because of the SMD part which I saw burn? I don't have any kind of electricity measuring device to see what that part actually was. And I also don't have a digital camera to post a picture. I can try to describe the whereabouts though... When looking at the back of the card, whith the AGP pointing down, it is the element in the right-upper corner of the right-upper cooler mount hole. What would you advise me to do? If I get my card down to the service shop, how much would a replacement of such part cost?
the chances are that it has fried more of the electrnics of the board.. i doubt it is fixable... but i guess you could just try replacing the resistor. Is it a SMD resistor (rectangle thing) or is it a normal TH one?
I have found an immage of radeon 9700, and the circutry around the gpu is almost identical to the one of 9800, and I have marked which part is burned. I don't really know what is it. Yes, I suck with electronics. The img.
From what I remember of that card, they are double layer circuit boards. As in two boards stuck together so chances are you will have damaged more components. Plus it's near impossable to seperate the circuit boards to get at the back of the blown component.
huh? I think those card has about 7 layers. And those components are SMD's wich means that they are mountet on the surface of the pcb.. It's only the tracks that is on several layers. The components are mountet on only two of them. and all components are replaceable from each side of the board.. Unless the components are BGA packets (where the soleringpads are UNDER the components)
Sounds right... I woulda guessed 5 layers though. (not that this has anything to do with anything though, but I have seen articles where simple components i.e. resistors and caps were ebedded in between layers for bypass caps IIRC, but I doubt a simple video card was built like this ) I hate to sound pesimistic but i think your card is pooched my friend. That screw touching only the right traces to blow only that one component is pretty unlikely. Stuff like this is usually a chain reaction, so the current that flowed through that component probably flowed through some semiconductors aswell and fried them too... even if they didn't smoke. All that aside, unless you can get a schematic for your exact card, there is no way to know what that component was or what value it was. I could be a resistor, diode, zener, capacitor, or something else so there's no real way to know what to replace it with. Sorry.
Can't somebody with a non fried Radeon 9800 just use meetering instrument to find out what that part is?
If there is nothing legibly printed on it then... Nope! The component in question would have to be unsoldered from the board to isolate it from the rest of the circuitry, and as much as we all here like to help in anyway we can, I doubt someone will risk their own hardware like this.
