Project: Alpha Dog

Meet my first real graphics card. His name is Alpha Dog (given by the manufacturer, not me). He's a 'superclocked' version of XFX's 8800GT. He was designed to be a thoroughbred that overclocked like mad; some users reported gains of up to 200mhz over the stock 670mhz. Unfortunately, mine only scaled up to 715mhz without any extra voltage. I let it go for a while, luck of the draw and everything, but I eventually decided to take matters into my own hands.

Meet Alpha Dog's PCB. It's pretty nice as far as PCBs go. Most of it's unimportant to us right now, though. We're interested in the area in the red circle. Therein lies the chip that regulates the GPU core voltage. The idea is to solder a 1kΩ variable resistor onto the feedback pin of this chip and a ground. Decreasing the resistance increases the core voltage, allowing a greater overclock. (NOTE: I did not come up with this mod)

 Here's a closeup of the same area on another card, courtesy of Dinos22 of Xtremesystems.com.

The sixth pin from the left is the one we want. It's official name is VSENSE. The red line follows the trace from this pin. Since all of the solder joints on this trace are effectively the same point, I went for the last one because it seemed to be the easiest. Now, the mod calls for a 1kohm variable resistor, so I picked one up at Radioshack and gave it a go one boring day during the winter of Sophomore year. Young and inexperienced as I was, I rushed the job and ended up taking off one of the SMRs surrounding the solder point. Whoops.

I posted a few pictures on Xtremesystems' forums and the members there proposed an elaborate fix. I was to desolder the remaining 3 SMRs in the chain (red X's) and solder on two 16ohm linear resistors in their place. (Thanks to Largon and Jason4207)

I bought the two resistors and spent a good 3 or 4 hours attempting the fix, but it proved to be too much for me. I sold the card to an Xtremesystems member for parts and he ended up fixing it and using it in his own computer. Much respect to him for pulling it off. As for me, I'm just glad my Alpha Dog is still alive and kickin'.