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GeForce 2 MX400 PCI voltage regulator burned up, missing solder
I bought two GeForce 2 MX400 PCI cards at the same time over a year
ago and installed them in two identical machines with industrial PICMG backplanes and industrial PICMG PIII 540MHz CPU boards. These computers each have 2 chassis fans, one at front and one at rear and 1 power supply fan. The chosen power supply delivers more than enough power for an entire system. After about 3 months of use, one of these GeForce 2 MX400 PCI cards began to cause 3D graphics intensive games to intermittently pause, stray pixels and odd coloring to appear and then a few seconds later, the entire machine would lock up. This occurred intermittently for about two weeks until the computer finally locked up and refused to power up. Upon removing both identical GeForce cards from each computer, I noticed a difference between them. On the failed board, the manufacturing process had neglected to solder the thermal fin of one of the regulators (lower left corner of the board) to the circuit board, causing an eventual thermal runaway condition. The regulator appeared lifted slightly from the board and had discolored the circuit board from the soft yellow-beige to a burnt brown. The GPU also showed burnt brown discoloration on the opposite side of the circuit board. The regulator had not been properly installed in the first place because there was no excess solder to be seen; the regulator did not desolder itself under extreme heat conditions, rather, there was no trace of any attempt at soldering at all. I believe that this stage of manufacturing must be a hand-solder job and prone to many mistakes, including poor quality assurance gates. The functioning GeForce board's regulator was properly soldered. I the remaining GeForce 2 card is still functioning to this day. I bought these cards around March 2002. Researching the frequency of this problem, through internet search engines and newsgroups I have found that other people have experienced similar thermal problems with many flavors of NVIDIA graphics cards and conclude that NVIDIA has either a persistent thermal design shortcoming or a manufacturing issue that needs resolving. I suspect they are aware of these thermal problems, however their inability (unwillingness?) to report or even admit these flaws on their web site proves to me that this is yet another sociopathically irresponsible corporation. Beerden |
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