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I bought a $10 Radeon HD 3870 from 2007 — tested it in 2026 (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/hardware@lemmy.world
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I picked up a Radeon HD 3870 for $9.90 — seller had no idea what condition it was in, no tests, no returns. Cleaned it, repasted it, threw it in a Core 2 Duo rig and ran benchmarks on CoD4 and Crysis. The temps alone made me nervous. Full video here: https://youtu.be/WuTVt4ZCmoY Curious if anyone else has run old ATI hardware recently.

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[–] [S] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Oh wow, that's actually a cool piece to keep! The ATI logo on the die looks amazing up close.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    haha it's pretty cute. some people make keychains from die packages like this.

    When I saw the display corruption in your video, I was worried that your board met the same fate. In my case, I was able to oven bake the board (with as much removed from the PCB as possible) to temporarily resolder the faulty BGA connections and get my data off the system. I'm kind of amazed that a deep clean and repaste resolved that on your end, but glad to see it.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 5 months ago

    Haha a keychain from the die would actually be awesome! And yeah, when that display corruption showed up I genuinely thought it was dead — was shocked that a clean and repaste fixed it. The oven bake trick is impressive, glad you got your data back!

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