The author recently encountered a frustrating boot loop issue with their computer, where the system would repeatedly restart itself after attempting to start up. Despite numerous attempts to troubleshoot and resolve the problem, they were unable to escape the recovery window. The author had tried various methods, including resetting the system and entering safe mode, but nothing seemed to work.

As the author delved deeper into the issue, they began to suspect that a graphics card problem might be at play. The card in question was a 7770, which had been experiencing driver conflicts and software issues. The author suspected that the fan on the card may have failed or malfunctioned, causing the system to become unstable.

The author noted that modern graphics cards are designed to throttle themselves back if temperatures reach a critical level. However, if the temperature exceeds this threshold, the card can become unusable or force the system to shut down. The author wondered whether their 7770 may have been subjected to excessive heat stress, potentially causing damage to the memory or GPU itself.

Furthermore, the author suggested that allowing a graphics card to overheat for an extended period could lead to its demise. This possibility was thrown out as a potential explanation for the card's failure to function properly.

In conclusion, the author had exhausted all possible avenues of troubleshooting and were left wondering what might have caused their 7770 to malfunction. Despite being unable to resolve the issue, they noted that other graphics cards, such as APUs from AMD's Ryzen series, performed similarly to or better than the 7770 in terms of performance.

The author also took the opportunity to highlight the market for used graphics cards, specifically mentioning the GTX 550 Ti and the GTS 450. These cards were often resold with a "discrete graphics card" label on eBay, but their true performance capabilities were often misrepresented or exaggerated.

In light of these findings, the author reflected on the importance of researching and comparing different graphics cards before making a purchase. They suggested that buyers be aware of the potential for underperforming cards to be resold as high-performance alternatives.

Finally, the author encouraged viewers to engage with their content by leaving comments, subscribing to their channel, and providing feedback on future videos. With this experiment now complete, they looked forward to exploring other topics in their next video.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis here is a viewer's graphics card and the reason we're making a video about it is because we have no idea if it works and if it does it definitely needs to be cleaned for that matter i don't even know what kind of card it is actually uh it's a 77 70. so several generations old and again just by looking at the shroud you can tell that it uh it's definitely not a modern car they don't really make too many cards like these anymore which is kind of a shame it does have a supplemental six pin and it's actually oriented kind of off to the side of the card which i happen to like especially for these smaller graphics cards here has a single fan and it shroud and the port selection at the rear is well lackluster in 2022 i'll say that this thing only has a single fan it doesn't have a back plate and overall it feels fairly light the heatsink underneath is quite small you don't need anything beefy for a 7770. so there are a few things in this video we definitely need to do and there's a certain order to this that's going to make sense first off we need to make sure that this card even works and if it does not is it fixable assuming that it's either fixable or already working we'll then take it apart clean it and then we'll test it because why not let's see what a 7770 can do several years into the future everyone's desperate for graphics cards right now and uh maybe going for something this old could work or maybe it doesn't make any sense at all because it's too weak who knows we're going to find out stay with me factor makes meeting your nutrition goals easier than ever by delivering fresh never frozen dietitian-approved meals right to your doorstep these meals are actually really good i'm not gonna lie i was kind of surprised by this and the fact that these are never frozen just means the flavors pop even more so here's how it works you set up a plan ranging from 4 to 18 meals per week select between 27 plus options along with 33 plus add-ons yep there's a lot there and select any dietary restrictions you'd like included say keto or vegan or calorie smart you can amp up your meals with add-ons like these smoothies and boom you've got a super healthy meal plan that'll keep you out of the grocery store it's all delivered fresh to your door again never frozen and in terms of meal prep all you really need to do is toss it in the oven or microwave for a few minutes so i tend to be a bit of a recluse i don't like going outside very often i don't like shopping for things being around other people especially in this day and age it's just yeah staying out of the grocery store is a win for me and heck even my wife finds it difficult with our two kids a newborn and a toddler which can be a nightmare in a grocery store so these meals from factor not only taste great but they also save us plenty of time each week because we no longer need to shop for too much food so be sure to head to go.factor75.com forward slash salazar 120 and use our offer code sellers are 120 to get 120 off again that's go.factor75.com forward slash salazar120 and use that same offer code salazar120 to save big time on your next meal plan with factor so to get us started here i want to run over some brief specifications of this 7770 i realized that some of you in fact many of you may have never gamed with a card like this or card this old you may have never even heard of a 7770 so here we go first up this is from the cape verde gpu architecture gcn 1.0 it was manufactured that the gpu specifically was manufactured by tsmc the node is 28 nanometers and there are 1.5 billion transistors packed into it this is a pci express 3.0 card utilizing a full 16 lanes here it is technically dx12 capable but it really should be used for up to dx11 titles and get this a launch price was roughly 150 us dollars now a few interesting facts about this particular card this one seems to have never been opened in its 10 or so years of life you can see that they're still the warranty void sticker from msi it doesn't look like it's ever been removed and as a result it doesn't look like this card's ever been taken apart re-pasted can you imagine what 10 year old thermal paste looks like we're going to find out in this video now i should disclose the previous owner of this card actually just kind of outright randomly gave it to me he threw it in with a system that i was supposed to fix for him we ended up fixing the build but this card came out of that rig and he was kind of just part swapping and things didn't really know if this card worked or not i'm assuming it will just based on the story that he told me which is why i'm willing to make a full-fledged video about this if we end up not being able to fix it i guess this would just be one big flop but you'll get to see it on camera i'm hoping that we can revive this if it is revivable if it does need to be fixed to some extent and then again we'll take it apart and clean it we'll repaste it try to give this thing new life and then what i'll do since i guess i technically own it now is i'll give it away to somebody who will actually make good use of this car this is a bit too old frankly a bit too weak for for me i would never really use it it would just sit in the closet and collect dust so i'd rather give this to someone who would make proper good use of it now this build here is actually nzxt's foundation pre-built pc that we have shown in the past we've actually run a few ads for this build here it's a great entry level system if you want to get into gaming and not break the bank especially in this market where graphics cards are extremely expensive this build just has an apu in it i think it's a ryzen 550 600g it might be the 5700g but either way i think that those aps are really nice really a good value especially again in this market so i just want to show you guys that this thing works that has no issues and that it posts because what we're going to do after this is just connect this 7770 straight into the motherboard and then run off of the discrete cards hd mi port right now we've plugged things directly into the motherboard and we should be should be getting a post should i plug everything in correctly oh okay ah connect to power that would make that would make a lot of sense that's probably why we didn't get a pay there we go okay cool so you can see the system works uh without a card in here because again we're running off of the apu so now we're gonna power the system back off and all i'm gonna do is connect the cord we also need to connect discrete power to this uh pci supplemental power just one six pin so and she goes clip it in and then power here all righty then gonna remove hdmi from the motherboard and connect it to the card and by the way the card's not bolted to the case there's really no point uh we're gonna power it back on and let's see if we get picture out through this card i have no idea if we will or not i'm hoping we do oh yes look at that look at that now i noticed the fan isn't spinning that's a bit concerning yeah the fan should definitely be spinning by this point uh that's weird is it plugged in i can't really tell uh yeah fan is connected it just doesn't want to spin yeah that's really weird i mean maybe it'll kick on it keeps scanning drives it's really strange oh it's artifacting a bit oh okay this might not be as good a situation as i initially thought so anytime you see discolorations like this on the screen maybe there's just like a an area of the picture that's like completely black or it's green or blue or some color that you obviously know it shouldn't be you can see a few lines here like that with this particular video out that could be one of a few things i have seen where monitors do this themselves i know this monitor works just fine though you guys saw previously when we booted through the apu everything looked fine this could also be the result of a bad cable a display cable could be hdmi dvi displayport get the idea or more than likely it could be the graphics card itself maybe the gpu is overheating maybe there's some issue with memory uh more often than not this i find is unfixable at least with conventional tooling you might have to send this in to get it reballed let's say if it's the issue with the gpu you may have to actually replace the gpu itself which at this point for a card this old it's just not going to be feasible now that said we might still be able to use this card despite these weird bands of discoloration it really just depends on how this card holds up to our stress test at this point part of this might be because the fan isn't turning so maybe the gpu is getting too hot who knows although i think by this point if it was idling and overheating the whole thing would have just shut down and yeah this fan looks to be completely cooked it is not turning at all by this point it definitely should be because the card is hot actually the system looks like it just reset itself and i think it's because the card is overheating so i'm going to turn the thing off just to save it see it looks like it's starting up and then it shuts down yep oof okay so i actually kind of just rigged a fan directly in front of the card or the shroud rather so that the card could get some airflow i wanted to boot into the system and see what was actually happening in temperatures while the car wasn't idle and uh it's just boot loops now yeah it doesn't even throw us into the operating system it's really weird um it was working before but now we just keep getting thrown into the recovery window like it refuses to initialize the boot volume i don't know um let's try unplugging the card again running through integrated graphics and seeing if we can get in that way i'm assuming we can it's just kind of weird that the card is causing this here now we are getting a solid 12 volts to the fan in the card so the fan should be receiving power i think the fan itself is what's bad possibly bad bearings or maybe there's something uh yeah just just broken internally who knows but i think that just swapping the fan out would be the easy fix here and would you look at that surprise surprise with the graphics card removed everything runs fine so what the heck i mean what we can really do at this point is take it apart we'll clean it thoroughly and then hope that that fixes it although i doubt it will we can also take the opportunity once everything is disassembled to give the entire pcb a once-over see if there's any obvious issues with any smds beyond that though i don't have the tools to fix anything gpu or memory related so um that'll be fun definitely feels a bit weird being the first person to open this card in literally 10 years uh assuming again that this seal wasn't replaced which i doubt i think that these are the only four screws actually holding the entire cooler to the pcb so there's that it tells you anything about how uh yeah how lightweight this cooler is what i'm really curious about is the thermal paste i i really wonder what that's going to look like wow it came off super easy okay so yeah quite a bit of dust you can see on the pcb itself actually kind of forms into the shape of the heatsink and this paste looks like it's almost like it's crystallized i wonder if it's sticky uh it leaves a bit of a residue i mean it's not like the worst thing i've ever seen especially seeing as though it's been on here for roughly 10 years but uh yeah i mean we could definitely clean this up a bit so let's do that now we'll start by cleaning up the die i've got some ipa here and q-tips all of my cleaning gear by the way you can find in this video's description we use it for pretty much uh each one of our pctc videos sometimes even fix or flop when it comes to uh yeah just trying to restore old hardware especially the ipa really helps pick up this thermal paste which again i'm quite surprised that it's in as good a shape as it is i expected this stuff to be like the most flaky chalky paste but again considering its age i'm actually thoroughly impressed it is looking so much better already you can see again all this dust kind of surrounding the gpu we're going to pick this up as well i could just take my duster to this my electric duster but i'd rather not blow this stuff all around the office could take it outside as well that's what i'd recommend if you want to use a vacuum or a duster like the one we use but uh yeah i mean the q-tip and the ipa usually gets most of this stuff up and now we can whip out the electric duster i actually ended up getting a new one because my old one broke i'm not sure why it wouldn't turn on anymore but this one's a bit more heavy duty so hopefully it cleans a bit better here we go there are a few remaining areas of this board that are just kind of smeared so i'm just cleaning that up with some isopropyl and q-tips once more uh and then once i'm finished with this we'll give this board when it's when it's properly cleaned uh a quick visual inspection will look for any issues with smds i don't want to probe every single smb on this board i just don't think that it's really worth it again given the caliber of this card and and the value of it even in this market but if we do see anything pretty obvious i will try my best to address it i'm not sure if i'll have replacement components for board this old i don't really have a donor board for a 7770 laying around but we might be able to find some comparable replacements if they are needed looking at it now though i'm not entirely sure there's anything obvious wrong with this card which i kind of wasn't hoping for because that means it's likely either a gpu issue or a memory issue neither of those i can fix in the studio now again paying close attention to areas of this board i don't see any issues with resistors there are no blown capacitors i can see or anything like that the board actually looks to be in really good shape again given its age doesn't look like it was used and abused but uh you know who knows there could be something lying under the surface that's preventing this cord from functioning properly and the reason for that boot loop could be again the gpu or one of the memory modules or memory chips i should say you just never really know so now that this is clean i'm going to look at the fan and the shroud see if we can fix that and then we'll put this all back together and try to get it to boot yeah these cheap graphics card coolers really remind me of like the old-school uh intel stock cooler heat sinks you know just the aluminum kind of like explosion looking heat sink here this is pretty gross we'll clean this up the fan itself doesn't seem to have any issues with spinning i don't hear anything in the bearings anything grinding there's no real resistance see the fan blades spin freely so it's possible that there's something wrong with the small little circuit board in here uh there also could be maybe a hair or something that's wrapped around um the the blades or inside the uh the fan itself that keeps it from spinning so that's a possibility as well i'm going to take the fan out and just give it a quick once over clean it up on the inside without using ipa because i don't want to toast the lubricant in here i might add some more lube to it as well just to help it spin a bit if it can and then we'll put it all back together let's see what we have here okay the shroud we can just uh we'll toss this under some like hot water just to get rid of all the dust and then we'll dry it off this fan though uh yeah it's kind of hard to see in there it's quite dusty but i've seen much dustier fans than this work perfectly fine so i don't think that the lack of cleanliness here is the real issue we'll give the shroud a quick rinse in my kids sink because i'm too lazy to go outside and use the hose but uh yeah same idea by the way a toothbrush and some soap both come in very handy here and after giving the fan a quick scrub and dusting everything was thoroughly dried the card is now ready to be reassembled we're obviously going to have fresh thermal paste this time which should help with temperatures assuming again the card can actually function now a quick word on thermal paste application for especially like gpus like these where you've got the exposed dye you want to add a bit more thermal paste than you would think is necessary for something like this because you really don't want to underestimate and end up not having enough thermal paste to cover the entire die you'll get some really toasty temperatures there your card might throttle it might not even function uh when gaming so it's okay to add a bit more yes some of this will spill over onto the substrate around it but that's okay so long as the paste you're using is not thermally conductive obviously it's thermally conductive but not electrically conductive and there are very few compounds out there that are electrically conductive obviously liquid metal usually is so if you're going to apply lm it wouldn't really make sense for a card like this but especially for beefier cards and you're worried about spillage what you can do is take some clear nail polish and cover these little smds here to prevent any shorts i totally forgot how the heat sink goes into this i should have uh i should have taken some notes i think i'm gonna have to reference footage to get this thing reassembled i think that might be how it went like that there i don't know we'll find out and with that there this card should be good to go check that out it looks so much better now you could almost pass this off as a new card if it wasn't for the weird coloring and stuff now there is one remaining variable i haven't fully considered regarding how this card functions if the if the board detects that the fan isn't spinning could that be the reason why we're getting this kind of strange behavior where the car just refuses to boot up fully that i'm not sure about i might be able to trick this thing into thinking the fan is working by just kind of tacking on a fan that's not actually like you know bolted to this uh chassis here to this shroud and then that way the fan will at least show up as spinning the rpm will will register and then yeah maybe then it'll post i don't know that's the only other thing i can think of that i can do here with the limited tooling i have at my disposal will us restoring this card be the cure i don't really think so but uh worth a shot right i mean it's the only thing i can really do at this point so let's connect power and i'm not even going to run that extra fan because if it's just going to do the same thing there's really no point and then we'll plug the hdmi cable directly into the card everything's fully slotted in okay you ready here we go oh the fan spun it spun i saw it spin come on spin up again spin up again come on is it gonna work uh i don't think it's gonna wow i actually saw the card spin up that's really cool but uh yeah i think it's just boot looping now dang it we should be getting a picture out and we're not another thing i just thought of display out so let's try a dvi adapter here so we'll be coming out of the dvi port instead of the hdmi port just in case the hdmi port is what's giving us these issues i highly doubt it but i have this to try so why not we'll also try it with a display port cable a few moments later of course neither of those things worked so my final attempt at getting this card to work i have a shroud from a 1660 and i think it has the exact same fan connector that the 777 uses i'm just gonna wire this into this card and see if yeah we can trick it into thinking the fans work again the shroud doesn't actually fit onto this pcb but i just want to kind of wire it there and maybe it'll see the fan spin and work this i'm getting desperate i know this shouldn't classically work but uh whatever again final straw they don't call me captain jank sparrow for nothing that shroud is just hanging there uh really hoping it'll screw that up because that's gonna be expensive to replace in this market all right let's see now according to my measurements with the multimeter these fans should spin because i know this card functions perfectly fine so if we're getting power from the board to the fans which again we measured with the multimeter these should work so yes okay okay that's good good stuff uh let's see we got a picture come on i'm crossing everything i got here nope same thing man all right well at least we know it's not the fans meanwhile now it has been another day i've been really struggling with whether or not i should just continue spending time with this graphics card there's one big thing that i left out of this video and i wanted to go back and revisit it because i didn't want to be bombarded with a bunch of comments about i didn't do this or didn't do that i was trying to think of every possible scenario i could put this card in to try to get it to work i didn't try safe mode and the reason why i didn't was because for whatever reason we you know got into windows the first time and then after that it just stopped booting essentially into the volume so i took it upon myself to do that to to boot into safe mode which proved very problematic uh ran into several just really weird artifacts the screen was glitching i tried my best to reinstall drivers um i'm just not sure if this is like some kind of driver conflict or what we're looking at here but that was my suspicion in the moment so ultimately it was so corrupt i mean i couldn't even use windows it was totally just it just crapped itself so i reinstalled windows 10 outright got back into the home screen after fiddling with things a bit i don't again i don't know why this graphics card is causing so many issues with windows but i finally got a hold of 7700 hd series drivers from amd i installed those and right around the time that the graphics driver specifically was being installed the pc shut down and restarted itself and now we've ended up here at this recovery window which is just essentially one big boot loop i have tried so many times to get out of this page no matter what i do no matter how many times i reset or jump into safe mode i end up in this screen here and it's just the most frustrating thing ever so uh yeah i i tried to give it one last big hurrah but uh alas safe mode driver conflicts software issues i mean this card just just doesn't want to work and the other thing too that i didn't really think about until now as to why this card might be doing what it's doing if the fan died and the owner of the card at the time didn't know the fan died it's possible that the graphics card overheated now graphics cards are designed at least a lot of the modern ones are designed or should be designed to throttle themselves back if temperatures reach a dangerous level uh if that t-junction is 100 degrees celsius or 105 degrees celsius by the time that temperature is reached either the frequency will have throttled back so hard into oblivion that the card is unusable or the card will force the system to shut down now if for whatever reason that didn't happen or i don't know i mean the card was just like baking at 100 degrees c and that was kind of it and the you know frequency was throttled back enough to where temperature didn't exceed that but at the same time you know 100 degrees c at constant temperature is no good for really any card out there i wouldn't recommend it um maybe that is what kind of partially cooked either the memory or the gpu itself and that's why no matter what i try here i can't get the card to work i just i'm just throwing that out there because that's the only other thing that i noticed that's wrong with a card and it is possible to damage a card in this way by simply allowing it to overheat so uh who really knows just throwing out another option i could be the one that could be the reason why but it could also not be who knows i don't i don't know again i feel like i've exhausted every possible resource i don't know anyway back to uh the conclusion of this video dang it i was really hoping we'd be able to get this thing up and running and i suppose in a way it already kind of did work i mean heck we even got to the windows load screen or the home page in windows but uh i don't know i think that this card it's definitely finicky i'm still not entirely sure what's wrong with the fan and beyond that i think that uh it's probably fixable just not in this environment i just don't have again the tools so i i wish i had more news for you i was really hoping that we could get a little more out of this little guy but uh it's just not meant to be right now and by the way for those wondering about performance which was the other thing we were hoping to test in this video i'll give you a bit of a spoiler uh there are apu's right now that perform as good if not better than this 7770 in fact this card kind of ranks in with like the gtx 550 ti that's probably the higher end like the upper echelon of this card's performance the lower end would probably be more like a gts 450 and those are the cards that a lot of scammers on ebay and elsewhere are kind of like they're flashing vbiosis for 1050s and 1050 ti's onto those things trying to rebrand them and sell them as things that they're not we've made videos on them and i'll have one link below if you're interested but anyway long story short this card kind of performs on par with those and for what these are selling for on ebay in this market there aren't many of them out there still it just doesn't really make sense to spend that extra money on a discreet card like this when you could get similar power or much more power much more performance out of a comparable apu like the ryzen 5 5600g or 5700g again those are my new benchmark for weak graphics cards especially older graphics cards going into 2022 and if they can't keep up with those apus i can't really recommend them unless you can get these cards for like 20 or 30 bucks and even then i think there's still a bit of a stretch that needs to be made to justify them in current builds with that if you guys enjoyed this little experiment let me know by giving this one a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated leave a comment down below consider subscribing and i suppose i'll catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for learning with methis here is a viewer's graphics card and the reason we're making a video about it is because we have no idea if it works and if it does it definitely needs to be cleaned for that matter i don't even know what kind of card it is actually uh it's a 77 70. so several generations old and again just by looking at the shroud you can tell that it uh it's definitely not a modern car they don't really make too many cards like these anymore which is kind of a shame it does have a supplemental six pin and it's actually oriented kind of off to the side of the card which i happen to like especially for these smaller graphics cards here has a single fan and it shroud and the port selection at the rear is well lackluster in 2022 i'll say that this thing only has a single fan it doesn't have a back plate and overall it feels fairly light the heatsink underneath is quite small you don't need anything beefy for a 7770. so there are a few things in this video we definitely need to do and there's a certain order to this that's going to make sense first off we need to make sure that this card even works and if it does not is it fixable assuming that it's either fixable or already working we'll then take it apart clean it and then we'll test it because why not let's see what a 7770 can do several years into the future everyone's desperate for graphics cards right now and uh maybe going for something this old could work or maybe it doesn't make any sense at all because it's too weak who knows we're going to find out stay with me factor makes meeting your nutrition goals easier than ever by delivering fresh never frozen dietitian-approved meals right to your doorstep these meals are actually really good i'm not gonna lie i was kind of surprised by this and the fact that these are never frozen just means the flavors pop even more so here's how it works you set up a plan ranging from 4 to 18 meals per week select between 27 plus options along with 33 plus add-ons yep there's a lot there and select any dietary restrictions you'd like included say keto or vegan or calorie smart you can amp up your meals with add-ons like these smoothies and boom you've got a super healthy meal plan that'll keep you out of the grocery store it's all delivered fresh to your door again never frozen and in terms of meal prep all you really need to do is toss it in the oven or microwave for a few minutes so i tend to be a bit of a recluse i don't like going outside very often i don't like shopping for things being around other people especially in this day and age it's just yeah staying out of the grocery store is a win for me and heck even my wife finds it difficult with our two kids a newborn and a toddler which can be a nightmare in a grocery store so these meals from factor not only taste great but they also save us plenty of time each week because we no longer need to shop for too much food so be sure to head to go.factor75.com forward slash salazar 120 and use our offer code sellers are 120 to get 120 off again that's go.factor75.com forward slash salazar120 and use that same offer code salazar120 to save big time on your next meal plan with factor so to get us started here i want to run over some brief specifications of this 7770 i realized that some of you in fact many of you may have never gamed with a card like this or card this old you may have never even heard of a 7770 so here we go first up this is from the cape verde gpu architecture gcn 1.0 it was manufactured that the gpu specifically was manufactured by tsmc the node is 28 nanometers and there are 1.5 billion transistors packed into it this is a pci express 3.0 card utilizing a full 16 lanes here it is technically dx12 capable but it really should be used for up to dx11 titles and get this a launch price was roughly 150 us dollars now a few interesting facts about this particular card this one seems to have never been opened in its 10 or so years of life you can see that they're still the warranty void sticker from msi it doesn't look like it's ever been removed and as a result it doesn't look like this card's ever been taken apart re-pasted can you imagine what 10 year old thermal paste looks like we're going to find out in this video now i should disclose the previous owner of this card actually just kind of outright randomly gave it to me he threw it in with a system that i was supposed to fix for him we ended up fixing the build but this card came out of that rig and he was kind of just part swapping and things didn't really know if this card worked or not i'm assuming it will just based on the story that he told me which is why i'm willing to make a full-fledged video about this if we end up not being able to fix it i guess this would just be one big flop but you'll get to see it on camera i'm hoping that we can revive this if it is revivable if it does need to be fixed to some extent and then again we'll take it apart and clean it we'll repaste it try to give this thing new life and then what i'll do since i guess i technically own it now is i'll give it away to somebody who will actually make good use of this car this is a bit too old frankly a bit too weak for for me i would never really use it it would just sit in the closet and collect dust so i'd rather give this to someone who would make proper good use of it now this build here is actually nzxt's foundation pre-built pc that we have shown in the past we've actually run a few ads for this build here it's a great entry level system if you want to get into gaming and not break the bank especially in this market where graphics cards are extremely expensive this build just has an apu in it i think it's a ryzen 550 600g it might be the 5700g but either way i think that those aps are really nice really a good value especially again in this market so i just want to show you guys that this thing works that has no issues and that it posts because what we're going to do after this is just connect this 7770 straight into the motherboard and then run off of the discrete cards hd mi port right now we've plugged things directly into the motherboard and we should be should be getting a post should i plug everything in correctly oh okay ah connect to power that would make that would make a lot of sense that's probably why we didn't get a pay there we go okay cool so you can see the system works uh without a card in here because again we're running off of the apu so now we're gonna power the system back off and all i'm gonna do is connect the cord we also need to connect discrete power to this uh pci supplemental power just one six pin so and she goes clip it in and then power here all righty then gonna remove hdmi from the motherboard and connect it to the card and by the way the card's not bolted to the case there's really no point uh we're gonna power it back on and let's see if we get picture out through this card i have no idea if we will or not i'm hoping we do oh yes look at that look at that now i noticed the fan isn't spinning that's a bit concerning yeah the fan should definitely be spinning by this point uh that's weird is it plugged in i can't really tell uh yeah fan is connected it just doesn't want to spin yeah that's really weird i mean maybe it'll kick on it keeps scanning drives it's really strange oh it's artifacting a bit oh okay this might not be as good a situation as i initially thought so anytime you see discolorations like this on the screen maybe there's just like a an area of the picture that's like completely black or it's green or blue or some color that you obviously know it shouldn't be you can see a few lines here like that with this particular video out that could be one of a few things i have seen where monitors do this themselves i know this monitor works just fine though you guys saw previously when we booted through the apu everything looked fine this could also be the result of a bad cable a display cable could be hdmi dvi displayport get the idea or more than likely it could be the graphics card itself maybe the gpu is overheating maybe there's some issue with memory uh more often than not this i find is unfixable at least with conventional tooling you might have to send this in to get it reballed let's say if it's the issue with the gpu you may have to actually replace the gpu itself which at this point for a card this old it's just not going to be feasible now that said we might still be able to use this card despite these weird bands of discoloration it really just depends on how this card holds up to our stress test at this point part of this might be because the fan isn't turning so maybe the gpu is getting too hot who knows although i think by this point if it was idling and overheating the whole thing would have just shut down and yeah this fan looks to be completely cooked it is not turning at all by this point it definitely should be because the card is hot actually the system looks like it just reset itself and i think it's because the card is overheating so i'm going to turn the thing off just to save it see it looks like it's starting up and then it shuts down yep oof okay so i actually kind of just rigged a fan directly in front of the card or the shroud rather so that the card could get some airflow i wanted to boot into the system and see what was actually happening in temperatures while the car wasn't idle and uh it's just boot loops now yeah it doesn't even throw us into the operating system it's really weird um it was working before but now we just keep getting thrown into the recovery window like it refuses to initialize the boot volume i don't know um let's try unplugging the card again running through integrated graphics and seeing if we can get in that way i'm assuming we can it's just kind of weird that the card is causing this here now we are getting a solid 12 volts to the fan in the card so the fan should be receiving power i think the fan itself is what's bad possibly bad bearings or maybe there's something uh yeah just just broken internally who knows but i think that just swapping the fan out would be the easy fix here and would you look at that surprise surprise with the graphics card removed everything runs fine so what the heck i mean what we can really do at this point is take it apart we'll clean it thoroughly and then hope that that fixes it although i doubt it will we can also take the opportunity once everything is disassembled to give the entire pcb a once-over see if there's any obvious issues with any smds beyond that though i don't have the tools to fix anything gpu or memory related so um that'll be fun definitely feels a bit weird being the first person to open this card in literally 10 years uh assuming again that this seal wasn't replaced which i doubt i think that these are the only four screws actually holding the entire cooler to the pcb so there's that it tells you anything about how uh yeah how lightweight this cooler is what i'm really curious about is the thermal paste i i really wonder what that's going to look like wow it came off super easy okay so yeah quite a bit of dust you can see on the pcb itself actually kind of forms into the shape of the heatsink and this paste looks like it's almost like it's crystallized i wonder if it's sticky uh it leaves a bit of a residue i mean it's not like the worst thing i've ever seen especially seeing as though it's been on here for roughly 10 years but uh yeah i mean we could definitely clean this up a bit so let's do that now we'll start by cleaning up the die i've got some ipa here and q-tips all of my cleaning gear by the way you can find in this video's description we use it for pretty much uh each one of our pctc videos sometimes even fix or flop when it comes to uh yeah just trying to restore old hardware especially the ipa really helps pick up this thermal paste which again i'm quite surprised that it's in as good a shape as it is i expected this stuff to be like the most flaky chalky paste but again considering its age i'm actually thoroughly impressed it is looking so much better already you can see again all this dust kind of surrounding the gpu we're going to pick this up as well i could just take my duster to this my electric duster but i'd rather not blow this stuff all around the office could take it outside as well that's what i'd recommend if you want to use a vacuum or a duster like the one we use but uh yeah i mean the q-tip and the ipa usually gets most of this stuff up and now we can whip out the electric duster i actually ended up getting a new one because my old one broke i'm not sure why it wouldn't turn on anymore but this one's a bit more heavy duty so hopefully it cleans a bit better here we go there are a few remaining areas of this board that are just kind of smeared so i'm just cleaning that up with some isopropyl and q-tips once more uh and then once i'm finished with this we'll give this board when it's when it's properly cleaned uh a quick visual inspection will look for any issues with smds i don't want to probe every single smb on this board i just don't think that it's really worth it again given the caliber of this card and and the value of it even in this market but if we do see anything pretty obvious i will try my best to address it i'm not sure if i'll have replacement components for board this old i don't really have a donor board for a 7770 laying around but we might be able to find some comparable replacements if they are needed looking at it now though i'm not entirely sure there's anything obvious wrong with this card which i kind of wasn't hoping for because that means it's likely either a gpu issue or a memory issue neither of those i can fix in the studio now again paying close attention to areas of this board i don't see any issues with resistors there are no blown capacitors i can see or anything like that the board actually looks to be in really good shape again given its age doesn't look like it was used and abused but uh you know who knows there could be something lying under the surface that's preventing this cord from functioning properly and the reason for that boot loop could be again the gpu or one of the memory modules or memory chips i should say you just never really know so now that this is clean i'm going to look at the fan and the shroud see if we can fix that and then we'll put this all back together and try to get it to boot yeah these cheap graphics card coolers really remind me of like the old-school uh intel stock cooler heat sinks you know just the aluminum kind of like explosion looking heat sink here this is pretty gross we'll clean this up the fan itself doesn't seem to have any issues with spinning i don't hear anything in the bearings anything grinding there's no real resistance see the fan blades spin freely so it's possible that there's something wrong with the small little circuit board in here uh there also could be maybe a hair or something that's wrapped around um the the blades or inside the uh the fan itself that keeps it from spinning so that's a possibility as well i'm going to take the fan out and just give it a quick once over clean it up on the inside without using ipa because i don't want to toast the lubricant in here i might add some more lube to it as well just to help it spin a bit if it can and then we'll put it all back together let's see what we have here okay the shroud we can just uh we'll toss this under some like hot water just to get rid of all the dust and then we'll dry it off this fan though uh yeah it's kind of hard to see in there it's quite dusty but i've seen much dustier fans than this work perfectly fine so i don't think that the lack of cleanliness here is the real issue we'll give the shroud a quick rinse in my kids sink because i'm too lazy to go outside and use the hose but uh yeah same idea by the way a toothbrush and some soap both come in very handy here and after giving the fan a quick scrub and dusting everything was thoroughly dried the card is now ready to be reassembled we're obviously going to have fresh thermal paste this time which should help with temperatures assuming again the card can actually function now a quick word on thermal paste application for especially like gpus like these where you've got the exposed dye you want to add a bit more thermal paste than you would think is necessary for something like this because you really don't want to underestimate and end up not having enough thermal paste to cover the entire die you'll get some really toasty temperatures there your card might throttle it might not even function uh when gaming so it's okay to add a bit more yes some of this will spill over onto the substrate around it but that's okay so long as the paste you're using is not thermally conductive obviously it's thermally conductive but not electrically conductive and there are very few compounds out there that are electrically conductive obviously liquid metal usually is so if you're going to apply lm it wouldn't really make sense for a card like this but especially for beefier cards and you're worried about spillage what you can do is take some clear nail polish and cover these little smds here to prevent any shorts i totally forgot how the heat sink goes into this i should have uh i should have taken some notes i think i'm gonna have to reference footage to get this thing reassembled i think that might be how it went like that there i don't know we'll find out and with that there this card should be good to go check that out it looks so much better now you could almost pass this off as a new card if it wasn't for the weird coloring and stuff now there is one remaining variable i haven't fully considered regarding how this card functions if the if the board detects that the fan isn't spinning could that be the reason why we're getting this kind of strange behavior where the car just refuses to boot up fully that i'm not sure about i might be able to trick this thing into thinking the fan is working by just kind of tacking on a fan that's not actually like you know bolted to this uh chassis here to this shroud and then that way the fan will at least show up as spinning the rpm will will register and then yeah maybe then it'll post i don't know that's the only other thing i can think of that i can do here with the limited tooling i have at my disposal will us restoring this card be the cure i don't really think so but uh worth a shot right i mean it's the only thing i can really do at this point so let's connect power and i'm not even going to run that extra fan because if it's just going to do the same thing there's really no point and then we'll plug the hdmi cable directly into the card everything's fully slotted in okay you ready here we go oh the fan spun it spun i saw it spin come on spin up again spin up again come on is it gonna work uh i don't think it's gonna wow i actually saw the card spin up that's really cool but uh yeah i think it's just boot looping now dang it we should be getting a picture out and we're not another thing i just thought of display out so let's try a dvi adapter here so we'll be coming out of the dvi port instead of the hdmi port just in case the hdmi port is what's giving us these issues i highly doubt it but i have this to try so why not we'll also try it with a display port cable a few moments later of course neither of those things worked so my final attempt at getting this card to work i have a shroud from a 1660 and i think it has the exact same fan connector that the 777 uses i'm just gonna wire this into this card and see if yeah we can trick it into thinking the fans work again the shroud doesn't actually fit onto this pcb but i just want to kind of wire it there and maybe it'll see the fan spin and work this i'm getting desperate i know this shouldn't classically work but uh whatever again final straw they don't call me captain jank sparrow for nothing that shroud is just hanging there uh really hoping it'll screw that up because that's gonna be expensive to replace in this market all right let's see now according to my measurements with the multimeter these fans should spin because i know this card functions perfectly fine so if we're getting power from the board to the fans which again we measured with the multimeter these should work so yes okay okay that's good good stuff uh let's see we got a picture come on i'm crossing everything i got here nope same thing man all right well at least we know it's not the fans meanwhile now it has been another day i've been really struggling with whether or not i should just continue spending time with this graphics card there's one big thing that i left out of this video and i wanted to go back and revisit it because i didn't want to be bombarded with a bunch of comments about i didn't do this or didn't do that i was trying to think of every possible scenario i could put this card in to try to get it to work i didn't try safe mode and the reason why i didn't was because for whatever reason we you know got into windows the first time and then after that it just stopped booting essentially into the volume so i took it upon myself to do that to to boot into safe mode which proved very problematic uh ran into several just really weird artifacts the screen was glitching i tried my best to reinstall drivers um i'm just not sure if this is like some kind of driver conflict or what we're looking at here but that was my suspicion in the moment so ultimately it was so corrupt i mean i couldn't even use windows it was totally just it just crapped itself so i reinstalled windows 10 outright got back into the home screen after fiddling with things a bit i don't again i don't know why this graphics card is causing so many issues with windows but i finally got a hold of 7700 hd series drivers from amd i installed those and right around the time that the graphics driver specifically was being installed the pc shut down and restarted itself and now we've ended up here at this recovery window which is just essentially one big boot loop i have tried so many times to get out of this page no matter what i do no matter how many times i reset or jump into safe mode i end up in this screen here and it's just the most frustrating thing ever so uh yeah i i tried to give it one last big hurrah but uh alas safe mode driver conflicts software issues i mean this card just just doesn't want to work and the other thing too that i didn't really think about until now as to why this card might be doing what it's doing if the fan died and the owner of the card at the time didn't know the fan died it's possible that the graphics card overheated now graphics cards are designed at least a lot of the modern ones are designed or should be designed to throttle themselves back if temperatures reach a dangerous level uh if that t-junction is 100 degrees celsius or 105 degrees celsius by the time that temperature is reached either the frequency will have throttled back so hard into oblivion that the card is unusable or the card will force the system to shut down now if for whatever reason that didn't happen or i don't know i mean the card was just like baking at 100 degrees c and that was kind of it and the you know frequency was throttled back enough to where temperature didn't exceed that but at the same time you know 100 degrees c at constant temperature is no good for really any card out there i wouldn't recommend it um maybe that is what kind of partially cooked either the memory or the gpu itself and that's why no matter what i try here i can't get the card to work i just i'm just throwing that out there because that's the only other thing that i noticed that's wrong with a card and it is possible to damage a card in this way by simply allowing it to overheat so uh who really knows just throwing out another option i could be the one that could be the reason why but it could also not be who knows i don't i don't know again i feel like i've exhausted every possible resource i don't know anyway back to uh the conclusion of this video dang it i was really hoping we'd be able to get this thing up and running and i suppose in a way it already kind of did work i mean heck we even got to the windows load screen or the home page in windows but uh i don't know i think that this card it's definitely finicky i'm still not entirely sure what's wrong with the fan and beyond that i think that uh it's probably fixable just not in this environment i just don't have again the tools so i i wish i had more news for you i was really hoping that we could get a little more out of this little guy but uh it's just not meant to be right now and by the way for those wondering about performance which was the other thing we were hoping to test in this video i'll give you a bit of a spoiler uh there are apu's right now that perform as good if not better than this 7770 in fact this card kind of ranks in with like the gtx 550 ti that's probably the higher end like the upper echelon of this card's performance the lower end would probably be more like a gts 450 and those are the cards that a lot of scammers on ebay and elsewhere are kind of like they're flashing vbiosis for 1050s and 1050 ti's onto those things trying to rebrand them and sell them as things that they're not we've made videos on them and i'll have one link below if you're interested but anyway long story short this card kind of performs on par with those and for what these are selling for on ebay in this market there aren't many of them out there still it just doesn't really make sense to spend that extra money on a discreet card like this when you could get similar power or much more power much more performance out of a comparable apu like the ryzen 5 5600g or 5700g again those are my new benchmark for weak graphics cards especially older graphics cards going into 2022 and if they can't keep up with those apus i can't really recommend them unless you can get these cards for like 20 or 30 bucks and even then i think there's still a bit of a stretch that needs to be made to justify them in current builds with that if you guys enjoyed this little experiment let me know by giving this one a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated leave a comment down below consider subscribing and i suppose i'll catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for learning with me\n"