My sis got this board early on spring 2006, as attempt to make the Sims2 on her machine run a bit faster over Radeon 9000. The card history is long, but to make long story short, it served me as backup card well, when I killed my FX5700Ultra, and it even show great O/C potencial (under watercooling), but novadays I did not have any use for it, and sis like it.
However I noticed that in extra stresfull situations (like in 64k intros
fr-019: poem to a horse there
http://farb-rausch.de/ or Life Index (curiously not present in download section, but you can grab it there:
http://ax2.old-cans.com/life_index.zip) that the image like to freeze and then re-appear (no change to music or intro run) later. This indicate that the ram of core of GFX card has a problem. Either overheating core, or undervolted ran on load on load. Quick test (decreasing O/C of just core to stock) proved it is the second case (ram problems), and quick look at the card shoved Evercon caps.
Now I already suggested them to be added to the bad caps brand, based on my experience with JetWay N2PAP Ultra board. So when I was them, I know what went wrong.
There are five 1500uF 6.3V Evercon caps. There are also a Sanyo 510uF 4V Os-con cap too, but only one. I heard that these are excelent, so no change. There are also 2pcs of SMD 100uF 16V caps too. Tough I planed I recap the Vcore cap by a 560uF Pannasonic FM one, I quickly dropped that idea.
Gigabite 5600XT
----------------------
5x 1500uF 6.3V d10 Samxon GC
1x 1000uF 6.3V d8 Samxon GC (later added)
2x 100uF ??? (possibly later)
Now what we all waiting for - the results.
The Gigabite 5600XT card is what XT mark in nVidia. Pure crap. (probably to confuse ATI customers and anger ATI, where XT or XTX models are the best ones) The card come with
default 235/400Mhz clocks. That is unbeliably low, considering even GF2 cards are used to have 250Mhz core clocks...
With watercooling I manage it to unbeliable
375/535Mhz. Now the question is, what happen on passive only cooling (Zalman ZM80-HP) in fanless case, yet with exchanged caps from Evercon ones to
Samxon GC ones.
Why Samxons? Because Pannasonic FM ones are too big. They won't fit under the cooler, even the Samxons are very close. Curiously Samxons sizes are par to par with Rubycon or Nichicon cap sizes, however these Evercon ones are even 3mm lower that the Samxons! That just increase my doubts in them... And also because
Big Pope send me these samples for free.
There is another reason for it, I just recapped the whole sis mainboard with Samxons and gained excelent results, but that is explained detaily in other thread (about the JetWay V266B recap) already.
Anyway, the clock results. First at all,
core has to get into
355Mhz to be stable - yet this is still good, considering that the card is not watercooled anymore like it was:
http://ax2.old-cans.com/s.php?p=wc&id=30&c=8&d=1&v=v2
(illustration pic, DangerDen Maze4 GPU block on FX5200)
Now the rams, well, they started
crapping out a very little
on 565Mhz now!
That is pure 30Mhz increase, just for caps exchange. Well, for stable run i backed down to 550Mhz just to be sure, but then again - the demos won't stop anymore like they used to do before and 550Mhz is still a 15Mhz increase
(and a insane overclock from original 400Mhz...!)
Very very very good, if you ask me
Of course, the card is oldie crap and nothing help it, but... The overclock
from 235/400 to 355/550 is impressive. Is it not?
Any mainly -
stable! 
Yet now there is continuation of the story. The cap's echange was done into beginning of June 2006, however six months ago the sis computer is start making problems again. 15. December 2006 it freeze when my stepbro wanted to use it for copying something from DVD. His old home PC that is home now is not his main PC that he have on college and it not have a DVD rom. After few more days (we are clueless what can happen, prime CPU/ram tests are stable, so...) the crashing get worser. Probably because my sis start like one 3D game and that is of course not good for bad cap on GFX card... Witch bad cap? Oh, well, the one I did not exhange. The solid polymer Sanyo Os-con one!
I tried first decrease the overclock to stock, and when it then pass the prime CPU and ram tests (w/o that it crash even in 2D!) then I get suspicious and by "gut feeling" I replaced the Oscon 510uF 4V for Samxon GC 1000uF 6.3V. After that exchange I bumped the clocks back to where they are and no more crashing. I tried to push the core 10Mhz more to 365 and still no bug in display
even in 3D intros
If I had the card on watercooling it would be interesting to know, if it can get overclclock not over 375Mhz for the core - maybe 380Mhz?
Also very interesting bug in second to last scene in intro Life Index are gone. And I was all the time under the impression that it was because I used the beta Detonators (45.28, see there why
http://trodas.wz.cz/g.php?p=detonators&d=1&v=v2 ) witch I have to mod myself to make them work on 5600XT... Or because it was the card that it is not making some advance effect or so - but I never tough to this day that it was a overclocking bug
Damn, I tested too few times!
But this all means that the sometimes used old Oscons aren't good caps at all. Their perameters quickly gone very bad and even being replaced by "normal" Samxon GC make the cards/mainbaord operate better! Now that is a pretty shocking to me, as BIG fan on solid polymer caps. Almost breathtaking. Looks like we have to take in account this sometimes mentioned pretty low life expectancy of 1000h as fact and probably the lifetime did not extend twice per each 10°C down as with electrolytes...
Despite all claims I did not consider Sanyo Os-con caps as good ones anymore. The card was not used much over the years it was more in the cupboard that in PC. Hence the new Gigabite marketing claims about "all only solid polymer caps used on mobos" (
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/News/Moth...x?NewsID=1308# ) I did not welcome that much. My card has solid polymer cap. My card is used to crash with it in 2D...
Anyway, it still looks that it will be need to exchange the last two SMD 100uF electrolyte caps, as sis reported that windows right after start has sometimes fu*ked up display and need restart to fix, so I get overclock back from 365/550 to 355/550 and problems are gone. Yet the monitor DPMS power off after specified time did not working reliably, so I looking where to get such caps. I think should check if 6.3V ones are enough, because they probably aren't need to be 16V ones. And there are even ceramics (yep, even the polymers failed me, I'm still ceramics fan!) caps size 1210 and 100uF / 6.3V capacity now, produced by Taiyo Yuden
JMK325F107ZM-T
Gigabyte FX5600XT with Evercons
