What to do with the VisionTek 4870?

I just came into possession of an AMD Radeon 4870 from I believe VisionTek (there's absolutely no distinguishing marks or features which is a tad frightening) judging from pics on Google Image search.

Anyway it's artifacting like crazy at POST, in BIOS, and on Bootup. D-SUB/VGA connection doesn't work at all and neither does HDMI ... just DVI at this point.

I tried the Oven Trick posted here on our forums. Set the oven to 385, removed all the heatsinks and thermal paste, and let it sit for 8 minutes. After it cooled down I reapplied everything with Arctic Silver and it's still doing the exact same thing.

One thing to note is that it takes this card upwards of 47 seconds (I timed it) to actually boot up and display an image.

With that being said, I doubt this thing is still under warranty so should I just toss it out or does anyone here have any other ideas or methods I could try?

after it starts working does it work fine? like under load and stuff?

No it's not working at all. Major/horrible Artifacting makes it unusable. I can't even read the text at POST

hmm weird. any noticeable damage on the board? like burned mosfets or resistors?

Nope I've checked everything to look for. Kind of miffed.

Bump?

Well I think you've discovered why the previous owner is no longer the current owner, and it's time you moved on from being the current owner to being the previous owner!

You can try underclocking it, and you can try flashing the bios to the factory visiontek bios. If neither of those work, its probably not going to be worth the time invested in fixing it.

Nechen said:

One thing to note is that it takes this card upwards of 47 seconds (I timed it) to actually boot up and display an image.

Click to expand...

sounds like a bad cap
try what Supertrucker posted

then bake it harder. if the card is still bad, remove any thing of use
mine for gold/copper then make a nice gpu keychain

lol will do

Nechen said:

lol will do

Click to expand...

if you do make a keychain, I like to take a grinder to the bottom
so all the copper and diode shows, then I seal it with clear fingernail polish