I made an error

Not with my usual crypto predictions (though those can occur too!), this time I made a hardware error

I killed my graphics card.

Unfortunately for me my processor is a Ryzen X model, which I love, but it does not have onboard graphics. This means that I am unable to use the machine until the graphics card has been replaced.

It's really cramping my blogging style, I'm using a decade old laptop that hardly supports any software at all (browsers included). It still runs Windows Vista! Every time I try to install something it refuses to do so, rather amusing really! It also leaves me locked out of many accounts (theoretically I could access them all again if I had a better PC available - but I don't) for a while.

Luckily with the help of the ancient laptop was able to order myself a new graphics card. God must have been smiling upon me because my card died just in time to catch the Black Friday/Cyber Monday specials! I had to hurry the fault diagnostics, so I hope I'm right about it being the graphics card, but I'm 98.5% certain that I am. I really need a second PC to diagnose faults with the main one!

The first round of hardware fault finding (rounding two involved calling for outside assistance - checking my card in someone else's PC) involved some rather messy looking open-case troubleshooting! Take a look at this picture:

Let me explain to you what you're looking at here:

That's my defective old Intel motherboard and processor (the ones I replaced in these posts: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@bitbrain/quick-crypto-news-before-i-kill-my-pc and https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@bitbrain/i-did-it) plugged into the power supply and monitor of my current PC. It didn't work when I first tried it, hence the extremely ancient speaker lying below the board - which I needed to listen for BIOS beep codes, but later unplugged when it would not stop emitting a low-level screeching! Luckily the beep codes allowed me to see that something was amiss with the RAM, which is why one of the RAM chips is lying unplugged on the table - possibly defective. Embarrassingly: I tried to insert that RAM chip the wrong way around, even though it is physically impossible to do so! This may have led to chip damage. I always make sure I check the direction before inserting RAM to avoid that very problem, I have no idea how I messed that up!

This was taken before I inserted the graphics card into the old motherboard (at that stage I suspected a motherboard fault) so the screen is running from the onboard graphics of the Intel processor. Unfortunately you can't see it from this angle, but at the very back of my case there is a modification. If you look closely you can just see a tiny black bump of plastic protruding from the back (in line with the bottom of the plastic packet). That bump is part of the old cooling fan that came with my Intel processor. Because I use water cooling I didn't need the stock Intel cooler, so I ripped it apart and mounted the fan to the back of my case where it can blow cool air towards the GPU fans.

But because I now had no fan for it, this left me with a problem: I couldn't cool the old Intel processor plugged into the old motherboard. Processors get hot very fast and must be cooled before they either shut themselves down or burn out. So what I did was to grab the old heatsink from the fan, clean off the old TIM, slap a dollop of new TIM on it and just press it gently but firmly onto the processor. After initially almost letting it overheat (man that temperature rose fast!), I started blowing gently on the heatsink to cool it! It's not a great solution but it kept things running for long enough for me to do what I needed to do! :D

The other set of wires connected to the bottom of the old motherboard come from the "reset" switch of an old PC, I connected them to the power pins of the motherboard to turn the system on and off.

It wasn't pretty, but it worked well enough to get me to the go-try-the-graphics-card-in-someone-else's-PC-phase.

Eulogy

I'll miss my old graphics card. I think I made some great choices when I originally ordered my PC, specifically the processor and the graphics card. The processor was a Haswell i7 4770k - as you can see in the picture, the Haswell still runs perfectly. This is despite many years of use in a constantly overclocked state. By default it's a 3.5 GHz processor with a turbo speed of 3.9 GHz. It would easily run to 4.7GHz on only 0.01 extra volts - though I kept it at 4.4 GHz (turbo clocks) to keep the temperature and voltage down. I caused it to thermal cutout a few times running nasty benchmarking tools on it (Haswell has the weird ability to demand, and get, extra voltage under some circumstances). It took years before Intel really improved much on this design. The 4790k was just the same chip with a higher stock clock. The 4770k chip is still all you really need and was fantastic value for money! In retrospect: I think that the hyperthreading of the i7 was unnecessary to have and the cheaper i5 equivalent would have been even better value for money.

My graphics card was carried over from my original system and was not replaced when I changed the processor, motherboard and RAM earlier in the year (which is expensive enough as it is!) My card was Radeon HD 7970, also a fantastic overclocker! I never pushed it anywhere near its limits (warranties don't cover over-volting your processor and burning it out!), but even at stock voltages the card could run WAY faster then its stock processing and memory speeds. I didn't leave it in an overclocked state, because I preferred durability over an extra frame or two per second, and graphics cards are probably the single most expensive component to replace. But it sure did earn its keep, notching up tens of thousands of hours of heavy gaming without complaint. That is, of course, until a round of "World of Tanks" suddenly ended in a black screen halfway through the match on the weekend. The fact that is could still run most games at high detail levels with a decent framerate at 1080x1920 is remarkable! The design comes from 2011! (I bought mine in 2013)

Hats off to AMD for creating a great chip that lasted for many years. Hats off to PowerColor for building a good card with good cooling. The cooling system of my HD 7970 will live on as I will strip the fans off and use them to improve the ventilation of my case even further. I have no particular preference when it comes to GPU manufacturers, but AMD has always given me the best value for money and I'm going with AMD again with my new card. Of course I would have ordered a 2000 series Nvidia if I had the money for it, but I literally have zero income at the moment (come on crypto market!) so I have to be very careful how much I spend. Hopefully my new AMD GPU in an Asus card (Asus are the best when it comes to build quality!) will give me many years of good service. Hopefully!

Now if it could only hurry up and arrive so that I could install it...

The AMD is dead, long live the AMD!

R.I.P. Radeon HD 7970 - you did me proud!

Yours in AMD graphics,
Bit Brain

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