AMD Radeon HD 5850 and HD 6950 revived – cleaning, assembly and the hunt for old records | Time travel

1 - Motivation and joy for something old 2 - Refurbish: the nasty part (General) 3 - Time travel back: DirectX11, drivers and tools 4 - Logging, benchmarks and test system 5 - ATI Radeon HD 5850 - the dirt catcher 6 - Powercolor HD 6950 - it doesn't want to become a 6970! Conclusion

first of all, I would like to introduce you to how such a clarification process works for me. To the two maps I will write something in detail, here comes first the general part. First of all, my gambling always begins with the disassembly and cleaning of the newcomers. Rarely do the cards reach me in their original packaging (happened exactly once), most of the time the packaging also already reveals something about what I will find behind the cooler.

I had some older card that were very clean, probably cleaned again by conscientious sellers before selling. But the two cards for this article had their best days long behind them – more on that later, of course. My standard equipment when refurbishing is always: small multifunction screwdrivers with cross and slot, pocket knife, an old toothbrush, kitchen roll, cotton swabs, isopropanol, thermal paste and recycle thermal pads (more about that later). And in some cases, for some components, it’s also under the shower.

As a thermal paste I use in this case, incidentally, a previously unused syringe from Alphacool – I got in September 2021 with my Eiswolf 2 and the people from Alphacool suspect that probably the Sub Zero is inside – syringe unfortunately unlabeled – who makes such a thing? So presumably I’m using a top-of-the-line OEM product. I’m stingy with the thermal pads, though – you can pay quite a bit of money for them. So I’m mostly a recycler there.

Meeting of the generations at the part donation: it’s almost like Kirk and Picard – only no connective tissue was grafted between the two captains. Now comes, as suspected and described, the really disgusting part. But I wouldn’t have thought that it would sometimes get so rough. The images in my head I know actually only from Igor’s residual ramp, when he once again compiles the atrocities from the net.

So let’s go: First disassemble everything, carefully separate the card from the cooler, don’t scratch any chips or tear off any capacitors, if the cooler has a fan, also remove it, be careful when disconnecting the power cable to the fan, so that neither the socket breaks nor the plug tears off. Once everything has been disassembled, it is cleaned depending on how dirty it is – in a crisis, non-electronic parts are sometimes submerged in the shower due to the lack of a garden hose.

I clean the circuit board partly with a toothbrush, partly with a kitchen towel including alcohol. After all the rough dust and dirt is removed, it’s time to clean the GPU, which I do carefully with kitchen paper, cotton swabs and alcohol. The chip must shine, then it fits. I carefully remove small crumbs of the thermal paste with a toothbrush. When removing the old heat-conducting crust, you have to be careful not to break off any small parts. 

Then I look at the VRAM chips and see how clean they are. With such old hardware is usually from the pads already a bissl something rausgesifft, which I clean, but not necessarily replace all pads, because firstly, they are also not quite cheap and secondly, I help later in the cooler in a natural way still something, so that I usually get along with the old pads. Only when a pad is completely gone and crumbled do I swap. Yes, but where do the replacement pads come from if they are too expensive for me?

Nothing less than the reference air cooler of my 6800 XT I cannibalize for this, since I have this times on water cooling with own pads converted.