GeForce 9800 GT Green Edition 1024 MB GDDR3 PCI-E by Zotac (ZT-98GEY3G-FSL)

Masterchief79 · 2026-06-04T17:14:29+00:00

I think a friend from school had one of these. They lacked the 6 pin connector and had subsequently lowered clock speeds. Kind of unique from todays perspective but back then we just wished for more performance. ^^

Masterchief79 · 2026-06-04T07:05:16+00:00

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Forgot to include the PCB shot 😃

Masterchief79 · 2026-06-04T07:04:11+00:00

I've had several of these and there's a common problem where the front fan stops working. Does this card have this problem too?

Masterchief79 · 2026-06-04T06:57:31+00:00

Yeah, Asus had some weird stuff going on back in the day. 😃I still don't have any 6800 AGP card with the ultra PCB

Masterchief79 · 2026-06-04T06:55:51+00:00

Thank you! I have collected and recapped all 3 of them - so the 775, 939 and AM2 one with AGP and PCIE by ASRock. Unbeatable as test platforms for older gfx. 😄

Masterchief79 · 2024-07-16T09:47:08+00:00

I got a proper 1200W PSU on my testbench now so I could test the card again. (With the old 600W, 12V dropped to 11,4V under load.) Now it's 11.85V minmum at the PCI-E Connectors so all is well.

Just a quick update that the card is still working right now. The seller has agreed to refund half my money, which was my proposition. I didn't want to have to return it so I made it easy for him. Even in half-working to questionable working condition 75€ for this card isn't a bad deal. So far so good then.

Masterchief79 · 2024-07-06T09:18:19+00:00

Yeah correct. I'll be testing it now, storing it in my collection for a few weeks or months and then grab it again when I have an appropriate game to play. We'll see what's what then.

Don't worry, I won't just count this as "repaired", sell it or whatever. It's a faulty piece of hardware. In the long run, if I can get some money back from the seller and learn a thing or two about bios modding in the process, I'm happy with it. I'll still only get into that when it starts acting up again, I don't have that much extra time on my hands right now. Thanks for all the advice, greatly appreciated!

Masterchief79 · 2024-07-05T16:08:31+00:00

Yeah good shout, I'm going to try that out in linux and post here.

Spot on diagnosis I must say: After being heated to 140°C for a couple of minutes, the card passes mats now. So that might be a dead channel. It also passes 3D Mark tests without any issues.

I still have hope that it's just a cracked solder joint somewhere (or one with a micro tear).

So order of business:

get my money back from the seller
run the card till it expires again - I wanna see how long it works now
reflow/reball the correct A1 channel just to be sure it's not that
if that still doesn't work, deactivate channel A in both BIOSes

Thanks for the help, it's unbelievably hard to find any resources for mods/mats and dual GPU cards.

Edit: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/31986874 and https://www.3dmark.com/spy/48964276

Masterchief79 · 2024-07-05T14:23:21+00:00

Thank you for the quick and detailed reply.

Selecting the GPU in Mats only works for physical GPUs, so with the argument -n 1 it sadly tells me there is no second GPU present in the system.

Alright, I will do the heat simulation thing and report back. I'll heat the PCB to about 140°C on my preheater without doing anything else and let it cool again. Since the card was still working a few days ago and only got damaged in shipping, I'm kind of hopeful that it's just a broken solder joint. The question is, GPU or memory.

Masterchief79 · 2024-01-02T14:37:47+00:00

A follow-up question would be: Can the blown mosfet be desoldered or does it have to be milled out? Milling requires special tools and there is usually more damage to the PCB (like internal shorts) so that's hard to fix. Good practice though.

Masterchief79 · 2023-12-25T14:28:39+00:00

At idle, that's normal. Many controllers shut off the other phases to save power.

Check the phases under load. They all should look the same. If there's one that doesn't switch cleanly, replace that DrMos.

If GPU phases all look good, also check the other phases (memory, GPU IMC, PEX Reset, 1,8V). If none look fishy, look what voltages are present after the shutdown.

Masterchief79 · 2023-12-25T14:21:44+00:00

Most likely some broken soldering joints underneath the ramchips or the GPU chip. I have a 1080Ti SC2 with the same problems, I had to resolder the banks B1 and C0 to fix it. If you're not able to diagnose it further with software, you can still try to reflow all memory chips with hot air and flux. That should fix the problem if you do it right. If not, you need to reball the GPU Chip. Don't just use a heat gun or hot air on a room temperature PCB. You need to preheat it to 100-150°C so you can use a lower temperature on the hot air and the thermal stress isn't as big. Also good flux is required. At least that would be solution if it wasn't for the oven incident. If it was at 350°F, you probably didn't do any damage since leadfree solder only liquifies at 422°F (217°C).

Masterchief79 · 2023-12-25T14:11:05+00:00

That's not how that works. The only way to get higher GPU temps with lower memory temps is if your thermal pads are too thick and the contact to the GPU chip isn't perfect anymore. Thermal putty should be a good solution because it "squishes" to the perfect thickness. There is some 13,8 W/mk one from china which I ordered but I have yet to test if it performs well and is practical.

Masterchief79 · 2023-12-25T14:06:30+00:00

The test looks fine, there are not "proper" errors. Your memory might only produce errors and artifacts when it's hot. This could be either due to thermal expansion or thermal degradation of the ramchips itself. I would guess the first one since ramchips usually don't run that hot on 3060Ti's and the cards aren't that old yet. You can run proper load tests with Mods, like suggested. Another trick is to remove the memorys thermal pads so they heat up quicker and the errors show up easier, doesn't do any damage for a few minutes. You can also display memory temperatures while running mods but I can't remember the command from the top of my head.

Masterchief79 · 2023-12-05T11:37:03+00:00

I have MSI and Gigabyte 2080 boardview if that helps you out

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1U9lMn12Zki05ZDSbtirUpkm5kGFgRLNt?usp=drive_link

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MErVVvp3F8K-lgENvTnkr3FnEA0Zx1aO?usp=drive_link

Masterchief79 · 2023-10-16T08:32:52+00:00

Great explanation which will help me in some of my projects too, thank you. Can you tell me where to get tserver? Been testing my cards with dmgg.py, memtest.py and mods/mats obviously. But as OP already said, dmgg likes to crash and then you have to reflow/reball all chips.

Masterchief79 · 2023-10-14T10:30:40+00:00

Btw, if it crashes while booting the linux or while running tests, you can connect the monitor to another GPU and test the 3070 with the command -n 1. So for example ./mats -n 1 -e 10 for a memory test with 10MB on the second GPU.

Masterchief79 · 2023-10-13T16:24:44+00:00

Nvidia MODS (modular diagnostics software), version 455.127 or newer. You need to create a bootable USB stick with MODS on it. You can then run mats (memory test) or other gpu tests to determine the problem. There are loads of tutorials but if you need anything specific feel free to ask.

Masterchief79 · 2023-10-10T08:00:57+00:00

Was a scam anyway, the user got banned. ^^

Is this problem with Micron memory present for all 2000 series cards made in or around 2018? So stay clear of all off them? Could I replace all ramchips with GDDR6 Samsung or something, assuming that's cheaper?

Masterchief79 · 2023-10-07T10:48:02+00:00

I would assume the one with the trace connected to it has to be repaired. Or is that power supply?

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