Radeon 4870 crapped ceramic capacitor, help needed!

[materijalmen]

Cheer guys,


I got this little thing yesterday, It was dead, wrong flashed bios, which I managed to correct, the card was working till I changed the cooler...

...the card won`t boot up, I got the red led D601 error, which I know means that is a critical core error code. I found that the yellow labelled part is broken, some guys say that part is likely a resistor or capacitor, a part of the power handling to each of the VRMs.

My problem is that I don`t have a good multi-meter to check the measurments. The little part does not have any marks on it...googled to find datasheet, not luck...

You are my last hope, If I cannot find here any solutions then probably nowhere... I saw here so many volt mods, I hope someone will help me to check that little crapped part...

[Riska]

The Card will Work fine without that capacitor!

So check the Card over Again because it is not that smd capacitor thats stopping the the Card from booting..

[mockingbird]

Reference Radeon 48xx cards had a flawed VRM and ultimately develop D601... Non-reference cards with analog VRMs ironically last longer for that generation.

If you want to know the capacitance value of that cap, you will most likely have to take another cap just like it out of circuit and measure it. The voltage measurement you would need to take in circuit.

[Sparky]

Reference Radeon 48xx cards had a flawed VRM and ultimately develop D601... Non-reference cards with analog VRMs ironically last longer for that generation.

My reference 4870 worked flawlessly from day 1 (even overclocked) and still works great in the current owner's PC

It also did not have any overcurrent shut down issues when running Furmark like others did however so maybe it was special

[materijalmen]

The cooler on the card was an Thermalright T-Rad2. I tried to took off the aluminium heathsink from the VITEC chip on the card, I had to force it left-rigt but I had no luck. So I heated up (iIdiot) the card with Solac - TH-8320 for a 15-20 sec...then the heatsink came off wihout any problem...

For my bad luck, it smelled a bit strange...but I cannot see any exploded/overheated part. A little part of the VITEC and PULSE chip are broken, I used a very cheap multimeter to check /not me, one of my friends/ and he told me that there is maybe some short circuit on the PULSE chips. Some guys told me that the VITEC chip work without problem if that little square is broken...

Here are the pics, again, the broken parts are labelled with yellow circle

[lexer]

Sorry

[jaggerwild]

The cooler on the card was an Thermalright T-Rad2. I tried to took off the aluminium heathsink from the VITEC chip on the card, I had to force it left-rigt but I had no luck. So I heated up (iIdiot) the card with Solac - TH-8320 for a 15-20 sec...then the heatsink came off wihout any problem...

For my bad luck, it smelled a bit strange...but I cannot see any exploded/overheated part. A little part of the VITEC and PULSE chip are broken, I used a very cheap multimeter to check /not me, one of my friends/ and he told me that there is maybe some short circuit on the PULSE chips. Some guys told me that the VITEC chip work without problem if that little square is broken...

Here are the pics, again, the broken parts are labelled with yellow circle

Well if the quality is that bad, it shouldn't be too hard finding a borked one on Flee Bay. The one on the right looks easy to find the 1 on the left doesn't.