Took my PC to my dad's place today, and while I was there, I looked inside my case, and noticed that a cap had clean fallen off something and was lying on the floor of my case! A few choice swear words and fist-shakes later, I discovered it had fallen off my VGA card. There's no scorch marks or anything where it had fallen off, and as far as I can tell, the two little wire prongs at the bottom look reasonably re-attachable!

I would take actual photos of both the card and cap, however my digital cam is in for repairs! :(

I've included this photo which outlines the particular capacitor on the card.
on the top of the cap reads:

503
SVP
330
16

the unit is still currently working, however I'm afraid to run any games on it as I don't wish it to fail under duress. Any comments relative to this issue would be appreciated, others... well as long as they include dragons, are not needed.

so it worked without it ?? :/

Anyway, I don't see anything wrong with soldering it back on. Just be extremely careful not to melt any wire onto the circuit board.

last edited by Marty at 22:29:27 20/May/07

If it was still under warranty then I would try and get the manufacturer to replace it. Even if the warranty had expired, I would still contact them and give them a bake about their poor manufacturing practices. Give them a verbal and see if they will give you a replacement card for PR reasons.

On the matter of repairing a card, the answer is Yes, you can repair them if you know what you are doing. However, without a photo to see the actual damage in question, I would advise you to ring around and locate a tech that has experience fixing electronic components and take it into them.

FB ^_^

a bake?

You can use conductive glue, if you're worried about heat damaging other parts of the card with a soldering iron.

is the card worth anything?

just buy a new one?

just solder it back on. although those smd electrolytic caps are meant to be soldered to the pcb using a reflow oven & pads covered in solder paste... the solder tags do stick out far enough for you to get a fine tip soldering iron onto them.

Don't even bother. I've been running my vid card with a missing cap for nearly 3 years now, hasn't missed a beat. I knocked it off pulling the molex out of my hdd lawl. A few colourful words were blurted out then too. But unless you're pro at soldering I don't think you should worry too much about doing it.

The fan on my graphics card doesnt spin anymore :/

All the pins on my VGA plug are bent flat :/

like it matters clit with the s*** house resolutions you run, i doubt the video works hard

while screwing my motherboard down the mount points didn't line up with the holes so I just drilled new holes in the motherboard.

solder it back on, dont be a girl :)

while screwing my motherboard down the mount points didn't line up with the holes so I just drilled new holes in the motherboard

Safest way is always through a heatsink.

however my digital cam is in for repairs! :(

What havent you broken?

What havent you broken?

Both are not my fault! honest!

I'm just jinxed at the moment methinks.

In any case, the card itself probably wouldn't be worth that much money, but I'm a poor bastard right now, who really couldn't afford to splurge money on a new card right now, so if I can get this one repaired on the cheap, it'd be heaps better than replacing it completely.

This thing cost near on $700 when new, so I'd rather stretch that out as far as it can go.

Chances are that the capacitor is just there as a decoupling cap (lets you supply a bit more juice to certain bits and pieces under load, rather than drawing it all directly from the primary power source itself). If you start noticing graphics glitches under very high processing load, that's probably what it is. If it runs fine without the cap, let it be unless you start getting grief from high-load applications.

It's probably worth keeping in mind though that decoupling caps can also be used to smooth out your power supply (say, for example, if you experience a slight drop in power, the components will draw what they need from the capacitor's charge).

is that a 7800gt??