Am I lucky, or what?

[Miles Teg]

So, I was taking off the HSF on my 7800GT to put an Arctic Cooling NV Silencer on it, and I really fucked up. While trying to get one of the screws for the HSF loose, I slipped and crushed one of the little "things" on the backside of one of the memory modules. I don't know what they are (capacitors?), but whatever it was it apparently was not important, because the card still works (though I've yet to stress test it much). What did I bust, and is this going to come back and bite me sometime?

The goods news is the NV silencer took my temps down 10C, and did it while still being inaudible above the rest of the fans in my system (yippie!).

Miles Teg

[darthdavid]

What did it look like and how "crushed" was it (No, "thing" is not descriptive enough. There's lots of "things" on any given electronic dowhackey and they tend to have rather different functions).

[Miles Teg]

What did it look like and how "crushed" was it (No, "thing" is not descriptive enough. There's lots of "things" on any given electronic dowhackey and they tend to have rather different functions).

Oh come on "thing" is perfectly descriptive! Heh. Seriously though, I don't know how to describe it other than it's small H,W,D = (1mm*0.5mm*0.5mm) rectangular, and has three distinct sections, with the center black, and the outside sections metallic. kinda like this ascii.

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There are dozens, perhaps a hundred of these on the back of the board. You see them on just about and PCB. I've always figured they were some kind of micro capacitors, but never really bothered to figure out.

Anyway, I totally desctroyed it, enoungh that it fell off the board.

[Uraniun235]

This is why I don't fuck around with aftermarket heatsinks for my video cards.

[InnocentBystander]

My brother's radeon 9800 started overheating, turns out something borked the fan, it wouldn't turn anymore, so we bought a big fancy heatsink and fan. It was pretty damn hard to get the old one off, I'm surprised we didn't damage the card in the process. Sadly we then learned that there wasn't any power getting to the fan; it took a little creativity to power the thing. Despite the 45+ minutes it took to assemble it worked out pretty well. Though high end cards these days appear to come with far larger heatsink/fan's these days, so I don't know that it's as much of an issue these days. At least with the higher end GPUs.

[Seggybop]

I've broken those things off before, and never even realized it'd happened at the time. I'd see that there was one missing at some later point, but dismiss it since the part was still working. Those parts all eventually died. Never connected it before, but now it seems that there's at least some chance unhappiness for you may be imminent.

[Miles Teg]

This is why I don't fuck around with aftermarket heatsinks for my video cards.

Well, the old HSF was a dustbuster, and it was driving me nuts. In any case, the whole affair (of damage) happened because I was an idiot and used an improper tool while doing a delecate job (a pocket knife with a screwdriver tool instead of a real screwdriver). Installation was actually a breeze ( < 10 min had I not been an idiot). I'd do it again (with proper tools) any day.

Miles Teg

[aerius]

Oh come on "thing" is perfectly descriptive! Heh. Seriously though, I don't know how to describe it other than it's small H,W,D = (1mm*0.5mm*0.5mm) rectangular, and has three distinct sections, with the center black, and the outside sections metallic. kinda like this ascii.

That's an 0402 chip component, could be either a resistor or a capacitor, probably the latter since the board still works. Filters out noise & helps keep the power clean & stable, chances are your board will continue to work fine as long as you have a decent PSU in your computer.