Fixing my GeForce 2 MX (black screen) - after 20 years!
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- Опубліковано 30 чер 2024
- This graphic card is with me since 2001. I have I love-hate relationship with it. I loved it because this was my first GeForce card and allowed me to play games back then. Unfortunately, the card had issues here and there. Sometimes, the card would not give a video signal when booting the system. Another issue was that the card was unstable and frequently crashed. At some point, the card refused to provide any output signal. Just a few month ago, I decided to use the card as a subject to practice removing large chips from PCBs - which damaged the card further. In today's video, I am trying to undo the damage caused by me and I will try to revive the card to use in future content!
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Source of GeForce 2 MX BIOS files:
www.x86-secret.com/articles/nv...
Soldering iron (FNIRSI HS-01):
The iron is used only in some clips because the content was recorded at different dates.
s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_oBq...
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00:00 Intro
00:35 Current state of the card
01:49 PCBWay
02:17 History and repair
05:05 Solder bridge on memory IC
07:05 The BIOS and flash attempts
09:06 XGecu T56 Programmer
11:28 Assemble card and test
12:04 Windows tests
12:48 Conclusion and future content - Розваги
Interesting video. Usually the Golden Sample versions have higher frequencies than the standard card. Your card is I guess a Golden Sample because of its 5.5ns (183 mhz) memory, almost all the regular GF 2 MX only have 6ns (166 mhz) memory.
I don't want to say too much, but I have already tried a bit of overclocking - and the results were very disappointing. More videos to come about this card.
@@bitsundbolts Didn't the GF2 MX was so bandwidth constrained by its 64 bit memory bus that no matter how much you OC the GPU it didn't get any better performance?
That is very true. The disappointment is when overclocking the memory. Memory overclocking gives a measurable benefit for those cards. More details come in the next video.
@@RetroTinkerer the standard GF 2 MX has a memory bus of 128-bit. The GF 2 MX200 is the one with a 64-bit bus. There are also many GF 2 MX400 with 64-bit bus, but those have DDR memory and because of that, the same memory bandwidth as a regular GF 2 MX / MX400 with 128-bit bus and SDram memory. By overclocking the GPU of the GF 2 MX you do gest better performance, but by overclocking the memory the performance gains are a lot higher.
Strange that it's golden sample but not pre-OC'd, ah but you DID change the BIOS, so the original may have had the golden sample OC applied
EE here, and one of subjects of study/practice is IC design. This could be due to a couple things, but more often than not, it is due to a "read/write" cell malfunction due to data path failure.
The error you received 2AAA is the location address (as stated in the error). This simply means, access to that location is not allowed; or in this case, just not accessible.
The reason for the non-allowance is usually due to a data path disconnect within the framework on/in the sub-straight at or to that location. This is the most common type of failure (the oxide layer was not thick enough because it was from a batch where it was polished incorrectly due to incorrect geometry during the manufacturing process).
So, you being proactive and not waiting for an adaptor was the correct solution in the end, because there is nothing you can do to remedy this issue.
Hope this helps...
Thank you for this explanation. I got the adapter and tried to flash the chip - I got the same error! I even got replacement chips that also do not flash when using the programmer and an adapter. I don't know why, but I stopped trying. Somehow, the programmer also does not like those chips I got. It complains that the pin designations do not match and the software for flashing refuses to continue
It's pretty amazing to see a casual person resurrecting this dead gear. Hard to even know where to start with a black screen.
Had a similar issue with a GF2 GTS this year. POST but no image at all. I spent hours thoroughly investigating the card for damage but wasn't able to find anything. After watching vswitchzero's videos on the V3 cards, I then threw in a PCI card and flashed a bios from DOS (with nvflash I believe). It is running perfectly fine now.
Ah GF2 MX, my first 3D accelerator, drives me crazy. Some games always crashed after a few minutes. Found out after several month, reducing AGP Mode from 4x to 2x solve the problem...😲
Bonding with your hardware and understanding its personality 😄 what a pain!
that VIA chipset life
I remember reading back then that reducing the AGP mode back to 2x was necessary on some Nvidia and ATI based cards. It seemed like some of that generation of cards and mainboards that were capable of AGP 4x weren't entirely stable at that speed. I had a Radeon DDR 32MB card back then and I think I was able to run it at 4x speed on the Asus P3V4X mainboard I had at the time.
@@rasz I had VIA chipset mainboard i think at the time and didn't have that sort of trouble... Or was it SiS? Difficult to remember.
I liked my MX200 and I used to 3D model and play Dino Crisis on it ❤
It had such a fun settings menu where the keybindings menu would play animations of regina doing stuff. Also the UI was in Spanish despite the voices being English
Very interesting video! Looking forward to the follow-up with the adapter!
Beautiful work man 👍
I hope many old cards find their way to you for a new life!
As always, great approach to a repair attempt and very interesting video
You're making some really great content, looking forward to watching your channel grow! I have one of these in storage somewhere, time to find out if it works.... :)
It looks like 20+ years and a lot of cards are failing because of corrupt BIOS data. Thanks for watching my videos!
Great video! Seeing your channel grow, both in numbers as well as in production value is really great to see. Weiter so :)
Vielen Dank! Mal sehen wo die Reise hingeht.
Awesome repair!
Sehr gut gemacht. Tja, mit einen "Programmer" hat man in der heutigen Retrowelt immer noch ein AS und Joker im Ärmel. Ich hab den T48 und bin sehr zufrieden. So einige Motherboards und Grakas damit aus dem Tiefschlaf geholt. Und auch einige nicht mehr genutzte Netzwerkkarten mit XTIDE versorgt. Dank dir fürs Video. Klasse!
Awesome work and great video! It’s always very satisfying to repair a card that you had given up on in the past. I’ve seen many VBIOS issues on cards from this era. I’m sure a lot of these ended up in e-waste, unfortunately. The Matrox G200 series was especially bad for bit rot and Ive seen this on several Voodoo 3s as well. Those programmers are awesome - really love my TL866 II. I’m always discovering new things it’s capable of 👍🙂
It is satisfying to repair something that you couldn't a year earlier! Funny you mention Voodoo 3... Have you seen my upcoming project list??!
@@bitsundbolts No, but I'm very excited to see what you have planned! 😁
I had this exactly same GeForce 2 MX Golden Sample back in the day. It was manufactured by Gainward, but had the same packaging as yours. If I remember correctly, it cost about 1000 FIM (Finnish Markka) or about 168 euros. Good times!
I went from an ELSA TNT2 i think to ELSA Geforce2mx back in the day. I just started using Blender back then in 2001 - using a PC i rescued from a dumpster. The dumpster PC had a characteristic smell, a bigtower ATX enclosure (Codegen probably or Chieftec if i remember wrong), a Rage of some sort (dead), a spectacularly pretty MSI mainboard (alive), an Athlon i think 700 or 750 (alive), 128 MB RAM (alive), and some optical drive or two (dead), and some harddisk (dead). The crux of the problem and the reason it ended up discarded was the cheap 430W PSU that came with the enclosure, it was basically still smouldering when i recovered the PC. Just cleaned things up a little and replaced the dead components, mostly with stuff i had at hand, like that TNT2, a 350W FSP, and some optical drives, adding a fresh Maxtor DM80. Anyway Geforce was really a major boon in Blender.
The DM80 with "lifetime warranty" turned out to be a mistake. I bought several of those drives back then for various uses, and ended up having to mail them in for repair for the next 8 years, i mailed each drive in several times, each time costing me around 20€ shipping to Ireland. Fast drives, seemingly well behaved, but prone to sudden death.
I had a Mitubishi DiamondPro monitor at the time which i cheaply got second hand, which could do high resolutions and high refresh rates but in turn was very sensitive to the analogue circuit quality on the video card, you could outright see the jitter on many cards. So i wouldn't buy off-brand cards - if it was going to be an Nvidia, it would necessarily be an ELSA. Those ELSA cards never not once gave me trouble of any kind, and ELSA drivers were also better and nicer than upstream ones for a time.
Another nice save!
omg so many memories, that was my very first GPU, it was on a pentium 4, with 256 megs of ram, running windows XP, i remember GTA 3 could not render any 2D assets, if the card was running on directx 8, it wasnt until the release of directx 8.1 i could play the game properly
MX400 was my fist true 3D card. Yes, it was rebranded old tech and technically a junk even at release but at that time to me it was best thing in a world.
I say they were great! the price was anyway, I remember feeling quite sore about buying a Geforce2 GTS and then the MX400 came along at such a huge discount with a lot of the performance, it wasn't quite as fast but was more than good enough.
the MX-400 was my first graphics card in 2001. The very first one I had bought and it had 64MB and if I recall, it was alright for a 512MB Athlon 800 based PC that I ended up building. The MB was the Asus A7-V board, had to purchase the case, graphics card and audio card, the rest came from the old PC after trying to replace the hard drive that had failed in a refurbed AST Bravo tower and AST (as did PB) had fled the US, so built the PC by buying a gently used CPU, MB and memory from a friend. Not a bad PC as it was considered the shit back in the day (meaning, it was good). At that time, I was running Windows 95 and the new drive was 17.2G, a reburbed Western Digital Caviar Green that I still have (IDE no less) and it could not be read fully with Win 95 as it saw it as 17MB, not GB. Windows 98 fixed that.
Then I made the mistake of "upgrading" to a Foxcon Micro ATX board with 400MHz FSB, I forget what the memory was, and Celeron processor by misreading the specs in the ad as an upgrade kit. The PC was never the same after that and wound up buying a brand new Dell Studio XPS with the first gen Core i7.
I had a similar GPU journey - went from a TNT1 (Creative) to a PAINFULLY generic GF2MX 400 that had damaged memory from factory - I had to run it at 135 rather than 143Mhz to avoid artifacts. Yes, the card was so bottom-of-the-barrel that even though it had lower clocked memory than standard mx400 spec it could not even manage that - well what can you do, it was all I could afford at that time. Then, some years later, I upgraded to a Radeon 8500 from Gigabyte which was an awesome card to experience in its time.
Funny you mention memory. I may have a similar issue with my card. I didn't have the time yet to investigate, but will try to find out if the memory or the chip is to blame for almost zero overclock-ability.
Nice!!
Have a hercules 3d prophet agp that i have to try reflash also. And a GF7x00 that recently died in use for no reason.
Yes, try. Hope it is a similar issue.
I had a 2mx back in the days. Also just a small passive heath sink. It was always stable, even with overclocking
I had Gainward Golden Sample GF2MX back in 2001, it overclocked up to 240/240 🔥
Before donating the motherboard and PC a scanner and optical drives, CASE, PSU, plug power-cord, hard-drives, PII-350MHz CPU and heatsink, RAM, sound card, NIC, Keyboard, Mouse, and ATI Rage Graphics (and software) to a music student _(so he thereby had a PC so he could go to a music Institute)_ about twenty years ago, I had this situation like your hardware troubleshooting with a Geforce2Mx400 and a 440BX motherboard, so it was an almost identical combination of hardware to that which you have and similar symptoms. So I mean I had a challenge with a similar GeForce2MX in motherboards _(for example a 440BX intel Chipset)_ that had only a 2x AGP _(although it worked on more modern Motherboards with AGP 8x)_ and it appeared to be the card locking up on account of the limited oscillating crystal that dictates the bandwidth (and thereby interrupt request) of the AGP port, and so the card could not operate outside of a limited range. It would do 2D but not 3D in that motherboard but worked fine in other motherboards. It is similar in appearance of some symptoms to the IOMMU locking up of a Dell i350-T4 RJ45 NIC in a PCI-e slot of a more modern different PC lacking SLAT. This incompatibility with the 440BX Motherboard however was not a problem with an almost identical card with the legacy PCI interface instead of AGP. Likewise a 2x AGP Graphics card Riva NVidia (basically like TNT) worked fine in all the motheboards, however a TNT2 Nvidia by Sparkle which had the 4x/8x AGP slot would not work and yet worked fine in other more modern motherboards. The same 2x slot problem of the 440BX chipset motherboard pointed towards the oscillator crystal limited bandwidth. This incompatibility with that 440BX (a good motherboard BTW) could also be repeated with a Geforce4MX and a GeForce256. It would appear that, by you updating the BIOS, there has been an update whereby somebody has realised the Oscillator crystal's limited range is not being adhered to by the card and so a BIOS update (or replacement BIOS chip) allows it to operate within the range of the AGP2x slot. That card does not need anywhere near the bandwidth of a AGP slot and won't even saturate a legacy PCI bandwidth. Whether or not your BIOS chip itself has become broken, your symptoms resemble a catch22 of being unable to operate the card within the range of the AGP bandwidth dictated by the motherboard and you might have had better luck flashing the BIOS on a much more modern motherboard such as one with a 8x AGP slot.
You would be able to copy your backed-up old BIOS firmware to the new BIOS chip you bought to see if it read it right and to see if the old firmware was causing the problem of it it was instead a purely hardware fault with the old BIOS chip itself. Be careful assuming it is faulty though because it might not be. Remember that AT49F512 has a Boot Block Lockout which, when enable, prevents reprogramming of it. The RTFM says _"The address range of the boot block is 0000H to 1FFFH."_
If it is "broken" _(and it might not be but instead just a somewhat fussy semiconducter CMOS that wants specific capacitance when written to at 5Volt, but whatever),_ it could be a failure to liberate electrons _(when writing to it so it needs perhaps a threshold of tolerance not yet met in the valence band of the heterostructures)_ in a van-der Waals gate. To quote Wiki _"In semiconductor electrochemistry, a Mott-Schottky plot describes the reciprocal of the square of capacitance versus the potential difference between bulk semiconductor and bulk electrolyte."._
It could be worth you making a breakout with a breadboard _(connected with a home printed etched copper pad, maybe with some PCB mask painted on)_ and flashing the firmware of your removed BIOS chip with a RaspberryPi_GPIO rigged up with small cables (short runs).
Regarding checking the data when read of the chip (such that you run a checksum), if you have a function-generator-logic-analyser combination equipment, you could observe the signal coming out of the old BIOS chip as you attempt to read off it, or even use an FPGA to make one to do that since that (and capture the data too). You have the other chip as a known quantity for functions you generate in your signal path to send through the BIOS chip.
I no longer have that 440BX motherboard because I gave it to somebody in a PC.
This comment does not constitute medical advice. Proceed at your own risk.
My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.
1:20 Something similar happened to a NOS Dell OEM STB Velocity 128 (Riva 128). Massive chunks of the code on the stock 27LV256 BIOS chip were flipped to FF. I flashed a clean copy (I was lucky that I had backed up using a TL866 when I was first learning on it) to a standard 27C256 and bam, it worked again. Looks like a special LV OTP chip was unnecessary, too. For all of these old cards verifying the bios is good is a solid first step. Also, back the damn thing up when you get a new retro video card.
To me, OTP means One Time Programmable, that is no reflashing except to overwrite some bits to zero, just like on old PROM chips, but often using crippled versions of erasable chips instead of the ultra simple design of fuse PROM chips .
Hi Man :) I would guess problems with bios chips is based in their lifespan/capability to keep data uncorrupted and number of "rewrites/reads" . Have a nice day
I recall having some video card bios flashing issues back in the day. I had to give the flashing tool a parameter to make it flash correctly. Something about slowing down the flashing speed.
haha! i had a very similar path. i didnt have a TNT but a Riva 128. then in 2001 i got a Leadtek Geforce 2 MX (it ran much better if i didnt install chipset drivers lol!). great card for its price imo! it was great until late 2003 when i got a radeon.
GF2 MX was my first 3d upgrade from S3 Virge.
Very nice video! How do you solder those PLC sockets on? Those are kind of tricky to work with. I would appreciate any suggestion. Thank you.
Yes, they are due to limited space. I did melt parts of the socket. I just used the thinnest soldering tip I had (which was also part of the FNIRSI HS-01 bundle). I may remove the socket again because I have those flat BIOS chips and not many cards use them. I'd rather keep the PLCC chips for other cards.
@@bitsundbolts Thank you.
I had back then a similar upgrade path but in the end I chose a Kyro 2 32Mb, now for testing linux perfomance on an old k6-2 I just purchased a GeForce 2 MX, they are dirt cheap these days
Around that time I always wanted to get my hands on a GeForce card but it wouldn't be until 2008 when I had a Pentium Dual-Core PC with a GeForce 7300LE. Sure, it was shit-tier compared to the cards I so desired, but it's a league up from the IGPs I used to make do with.
I remember having a GeForce 2 MX die as well that we replaced with a GeForce "4" MX 4000. I wonder if that BIOS issue is what rendered it inoperable. I don't have the GF2 anymore but the MX 4000 still works okay, but I'm not using it in any system because it's fairly slow.
That chip not being blank means it was obviously a reused chip, unless you used it yourself, someone sold you recycled e-waste .
One common chip contents without text strings in the first block would be a motherboard BIOS with the reset vector and date at the end.
A trick to quickly verify card roms is to use the embeddef checksum field that some mitherboards check during boot . The checksum and image size are stored near the start .
I have a couple of cards that have this exact same behaviour. I was wondering if I needed a BIOS reflash or if they were Mac versions.
Same POST codes, but I have PLCC chips :)
POST codes I think are the ones you get when, after post; it issues the "press F1 to continue or hit del key to set bios", just before starting the boot process. At this point i take it as a "needs bios reflash" to work. BTW I also checked if Windows was detecting them correctly, that's a good sign toward recovery.
If you get a BIOS beep or Windows detection, a BIOS reflash may be all that's needed. I wonder how many of those old cards are trashed because of that issue 😔 hopefully word gets out and some of those cards can be saved!
I got a GeForce 2 GTS I bought a few years ago that I had the same issues with. No display, shows up in windows, tried flashing. Might hunt for a new bios chip for it!
I remember when these cards (MX400) were the ultimate bargain, from memory they were about 75% the performance of a GTS but half the price.
Went alread the Radeon route at that time, a Radeon 8500 to be precise :)
nicee
2:50 Ah, don't rotate the fan while it's plugged in!
You will generate a current and induce it to the card!
The fan has coils and magnets in it, you basically have a dynamo there ;)
the GeForce 2 MX consumes like 4 Watt, mine from Creative diden't even come with a passive heatsink, and I probably even overclocked it before adding a heatsink and I never had any stability issues
12:26 The new RTX 4060 Ti has a 128-bit memory bus - lol -.
How did you solder the BIOS chip socket to the motherboard?
The card has solder pads for both types of BIOS chips. I was unsuccessful flashing the original BIOS chip as well as the replacements I got. I decided to not spend more time on those since I could use a standard PLCC socket and chip.
Is it possible to add sdram to this graphics card by replacing sdram chips?
You mean to add more memory? I am not sure. If there were 64MB versions, then I think it may be possible, but not worth the cost and effort. But there will be a few follow-up videos
Ah, the MX, the worst card I ever had. Huge disappointment back then and a huge disappointment today (I bought back an identical card to check whether my memories of it were justified).
I was happy with my 2 MX, it replaced my Voodoo 1 and it was a clear upgrade, it gave me many hours of entertainment
You had the better Gf2 Mx The 400 was far better than the 200 i had back in the day. 64 bit data bus 133 MHz core and 143 memory.
"However it's launch price of over $250USD made it unaffordable for most users"
Meanwhile in 2023... 😂
Yeah, the past 3 years were very unfortunate for graphic card prices.
this is exactly what i want to do but all i have is a 100w soldering iron ;_;
I think that this "golden sample" is just a luring marketing rip-off of Gainward GS series :)
We shall find out :)
I need to get a MB with AGP i have my 1st card a 9800 pro, i need to test it if it works i can make a profit on it in 20223.
Cool. But, I’m curious, what’s the point of fixing this?
I finally figured out what was the problem with this card 20+ years ago. The card is pretty much useless these days, unless you build a retro PC.
@@bitsundbolts Thanks for replying back. Now I see the point. As a learning experience, and of course that “stone in the shoe” that you can’t get out of your mind. 😂👍
sadly i threw away a amd card i thought was dead even after replacing caps if i knew it could have been bad bios i could have prolly fixed it
i have a dead nvidia agp card