Radeon 4870 crapped ceramic capacitor, help needed!

[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

[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.