Capacitors just falling off is a sign of leakage. The electrolyte inside of electrolytic capacitors is corrosive. The corrosion will resist solder even with good flux, so after removing the old solder, you may want to scrub the area with a toothbrush and isopropyl alcohol. In the worst cases, some extra abrasion will be needed to really scratch at the pads to remove the metal oxide layer. But that's about the only real thing that would prevent solder from easily taking to pads and component legs when using flux. If you plan on really getting into repairing old cards, a can of a de-oxidizing agent like Deoxit would be a worthwhile investment.
@@lorenzoporciani Exactly, poly are solid, ie, no liquid. If you see a SMD cap with splits on top it's prob electrolytic, ie, if it over heats it needs to pop on top, but no splits are usually solid.
I'm glad you posted the repair attempt despite the lack of success. The history and analysis is spot on, demonstrating just how these cards really were a flash in the pan. I missed the Aegis PhysX card bandwagon but I did get my feet wet later with a spare PCIe 1x GTX 520 card I picked up for a different project. It really enhanced the particulates and rubble in the game "World in Conflict". Beyond that, I didn't explore PhysX too much. My GPU at the time was a GTX 460 Ti.
@@roveradventures What a coincidence, I'm playing it currently. Great environment destruction model, graphics still hold up and have one of the better plots in RTS. The only issue is the bug with one of the config files, you must delete it every time you run the game, otherwise your fps would drop to low levels.
@krazownik3139 forcing dx11 is also a thing for better visuals. I'm gonna try gpu passthrough with a W5000 and let my 2080ti render. See if I can play it on a 1600x1200 CRT that dosent play nice with adapters. Call of duty 2, Crimson skies, battlefield 2, halo 1 via disc. Loads of games I still got in a bookshelf on sleeves to play. Need for speeds galore. I really should get into gaming vids. It's nice revisiting stuff from my childhood. My last pc had a 8500GT and a dual core Athlon with windows XP service pack 3. Still works, Dad built it for me and I still have his older pcs around too. Those are another story though.
I LOVE your lab. It's very plain and stark, allowing you to focus on the work without distraction. I've been moving in this direction for over a year now. ❤
iirc CellFactor was the one single best physx demo game at the time. with gravity grenades and destructible environments, tons of physics props to play with lying around everywhere, it was glorious
@@oggilein1 we will probably have standalone AI accelerator cards from Nvidia, intel and the like to go along with our GPU. It would not surprise me in the slightest.
@charlesdorval394 didn't have that. But my seagate drive worked perfectly after a near 10-12 year hiatus 🤣. The old Matrox drive still does too. It has SP2. But it's a lil..crunchy.
Tip for solver wick: Cut off a short strip and hold it with a tweezer. The longer strip you use the more heat it sucks away from your soldering attempt. You need to practice a bit to get a feel for it. And don't forget to use fresh flux so it helps adhering the molten solder to the wick.
5:36 for these large SMD capacitors, the heat is being wicked away by the board, especially on the ground side. You need to heat the board to a decent temperature so it won't pull heat away from your soldering iron and allow solder to flow correctly otherwise the attachment will be precarious and the cap might break off again.
Most PCIe cards have large ground plane which make soldering on them extremely hard without preheating the board, investing in proper setup isn't probably wise thing to do when that isn't something you do for living but even cheap small preheaters from places like aliexpress will make your life easier when you need to do stuff like that.
Physx on Borderlands 2 still lags on current day CPU's. The FPS can drop down to 40 when a lot of effects/particles are being calculated. I heard because it was because it's single threaded, or they forced it single threaded in the Pirate Booty update. Such a shame it was never fixed.
Even modern CPU are way too weak to simulate those physics effects properly, CPU can't run 3560 threads at the same time, GPU and PPU can. But CPU has branch prediction, larger caches which are also shared between the cores, etc. They are too different and ment for different code. It's a myth that internet created that somebody ran PPU effects on a modern CPU. You can install Cell Factor and have like 10 fps on physics heavy levels on a modern CPU. Physx games usually had separate mode for CPU only, which ment much less Physx on the screen. And that's probably where those great stories came out, that somebody played Physx fine on a CPU.)
@homersimpson8955 I never mentioned Physx being calculated only on CPU. The BL2 problem occurs with the iteration of Physx on being "accelerated" on GPU. ...and modern CPUs have only slightly helped with the FPS on BL2 with Physx being set to high(accelerated on the same GPU)....so there is some issue there.
@@homersimpson8955most often game that use gpu physics use overkill physics effect. Sometimes it even make things looks much worse. Planetside 2 did try to use those effect in the end they only give advantage to players that cannot see those effects. They decided not to support gpu physx at all after that.
A rare moment i feel well versed on a video topic to share. Part of the issue with the original ppu was that the only publicly available version of it was on PCI. Granted, a fair bet for the systems of the time. But there was never a pcie version released, to the public. The only ppu on pcie that i am aware of, were on some rarified notebooks. The only manufacturer that sticks out as having a notebook PPU was... Alienware. Moving on... One notable game that uses PhysX well on pc, was Arkham Asylum. It has a dedicated toggle for the PhysX feature, and even calls out the minimum level of graphics and hardware needed to rnable the feature and maintain performance. That said, I'm more surprised that a lot of games that were also on console used the PhysX API more frequently on the consoles. That said, for pc games that use and support the feature, the _dedicatd physx card_ mode soon became the way to go. Last i looked into it, a gtx 750ti as a dedicated physx card was all you needed, in order to max out any game that used the feature.
Those cards are virtually absent nowadays or very expensive. It's usually a better idea to buy an old 8600GT or GT210 that are cheap and do work fine as a dedicated PhysX controller. Also note that it was possible back in the days to use an ATI/AMD as your main graphics controller coupled with an NVIDIA for PhysX. They updated their drivers to block that, but it's always possible to find a workaround. PhysX was widely used in countless game such as Mass Effect 2 but in a "basic" mode that could work on CPUs and home consoles. Only a few games such as Batman Arkham Asylum, Alice Madness Returns, Mirrors Edge.... had support for more advanced PhysX effects that CPUs could not handle. Plus, it was only cosmetic and did not rendered that well (I remember fog that looked like cotton).
I think you should feel satisfied. You made the card better and work that's a win. I've dmg boards and made them worse, but I didn't give up and learnt to re fix it and eventually made thr board work. That's with smd stuff too. A great channel to watch is mr solder fix. He has a few on smd components
I actually owned one of those, And while it did improve PhysX in Mafia 2,I later added a secondary 8800GT as a dedicated PhysX card which as you can imagine totally blew away this PhysX card, But without the Agia technology it would be interesting how modern cards handled PhysX.
Your video really took me back. I also wanted to mention that Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare (GRAW) was one of the first games I played that utilized the Ageia card in game.
If nvidia did not bought them they probably no longer exist. Just think about it logically. Back then then majority of games are using havok. Suddenly Aegia comes out with those PhysX card that only support limited amount of games. As a small company they did not even have the mean to make majority of game developer out there to switch to their PhysX from havok. With very handful of games that can use those PPU they were bound to fail to begin with in similar way how those EAX failed to be integrated in many games.
A physics card? Interesting Speaking of Nvidia thanks to the FX 5200 installed into a slot one pentium III I've been tinkering with after rough 20 years I finally get to experience playing Jedi Knigt Dark Forces II, Mystery of the Sith, and TIE Fighter95 with 3d acceleration enabled. I'd forgotten just how much better Jedi looks with it on. Xwing at TIE do have a graphical glitch much like the one you showed in the video with the cards first boot, Xwing's in flight menu when you press Esc and TIE when you end a mission and return to base. Not sure if its a virtual cds I made of the game discs using the retail software from back then (Its celled I copier Gamer edition) or the card switching modes. The only thing the system is lacking now is dos game sound compatibility. The too long didn't read is the sound blaster Live Vaule card I found on FB Market place turned out to be a Dell oem, I didn't even know Acer,Compaq, and Dell had OEM live cards. The other problem is the Asus motherboard has a VIA cbipset one that doesnt like Live series cards... Right now I'm using a card from Amazon (I forget the model number) the software says C multimedia, card works for windows even supports pre EAX 3d audio BUT the Dos support is spotty. FM synth doesnt work (or I'm lacking the Phil level knowledge to get it working lol) however the midi support does work. It has Roland SC wave table and sounds quite nice. Unfortunately the card also lacks a cd audio header so the period correct rebadged samsung cd drive I used in the machine well have to wait to get its cd audio cable plugged in The plan to address the spund card issue is to take advantage of the motherboards single ISA slot with ether a SB pro 2.0, a 16 or AWE series card,I'm hoping I can use the two cards without them fighting over DMA' etc. In the meantime it's game on like its the 90s! Edit Almost forgort the Amazon cards game port doesn't seen to work or it's only a midi port so ISA slot Sound Blaster would be needed for that too so I can grt my Gravis joystick/gamepad pros working
Mysteries of the Sith has got to be my favorite Star Wars game, and I never see anyone mention it! As for your sound card woes- I run an AWE64 Value and Audigy2 ZS in my P3 system. The only downside is the AWE64 doesn't have real OPL3. It's hard to find the "perfect" SB16 since all of them are flawed in some way and you just pick your poison. However, the Yamaha YMF724 and 744 have true OPL and are among the best PCI cards for DOS support.
@PhAyzoN Jedi Knight Dark Forces II is my favourite I'm afraid Mystery of the Sith is my least favourite of the series part of it is going from the live action cut sceens to the 3d ones with no moving mouths lol. Thanks for the sound card suggestions I didn'trealize the Audigy 2 cards had 9x support I thought only the first gen cards did. I may swap the Amazon card for an Audigy at some point but first things first a ISA slot Sound card is going in there... or one of the pci cards you mentioned
I remember watching Physx demos a ton but never had one of these cards, then by the time I had disposable income Nvidia already bought them. I thought about buying one for my retro PCs but its in the awkward era for me in that it supports games I can mostly get to run fine on modern systems.
I purchased one of these cards that is for PCI not PCIe back in 2005 and I don't remember what I gave for it but it still works fine with ATI/AMD cards too! Never had any issue with it. Glad to see that you have one! I have used this card on win10 too. Use lead based solder too.
I remember that many of PC-oriented magazines in my country complained that we'd need more PCIe slots for all those cards (GPU, sound and finally Physics Processing Unit [PPU] as they were called).
Well done Phill! you will get better with time soldering. I did yeah if you are into retro hardware there is no way around a little soldering from time to time ;)
I have this card and made a post about it on Vogons. It looks like your diagnostics got farther than my card - mine just fails outright. I thought that maybe the issue was that the card needs to be in an actual Dell XPS machine from the era due to some kind of firmware lock. However, as someone mentioned in the thread, it's possible my particular card might just be dead as well. I'm hoping to find one of those old Dells to test out my theory one of these days.
Oh nice, well, not nice, but shared pain helps 😅 I'll try levelling up with my soldering skills and then want to do a full recap and carefully check all the traces and everything. If the card is OEM locked, that would be a huge pain and makes diagnostics difficult. Does your fan start spinning after booting?
@@philscomputerlab I didn't check since the card was detected without any issue and showed up in device manager. I ended up packing it away for another time because I wanted to use the computer (late era XP build) for some games and didn't want to risk the card creating issues since it wasn't working properly. My Dell XPS theory is partly based on the drivers available on Dell's site (had to do a Google search to find them). Some drivers looked like they were for laptops, so I skipped those. The pages I found listed some compatible models for the drivers (don't remember the exact model numbers). They installed fine on my non Dell PC, but sadly didn't make any difference as far as functionality. Might be something for you to try if you haven't, since your card seems to be closer to working than mine.
@@philscomputerlab I left kind of a long reply to this, but I guess TH-cam decided it was spam. You can probably find it in YT Studio, but the short version is I never checked the fan because it showed up fine in device manager and drivers installed without issue.
Switchball's a game I like quite a bit that supports this. Pretty solid marble game that's much more focused on puzzles and physics than stuff like Marble Blast and Monkey Ball.
Thanks for the video Phil! I also am learning SMD soldering. Bruce from Branchus Creations has a video called “Beginner's Guide to Soldering Electronics Part 3: Surface Mount Soldering” which you might find useful. I have really improved my technique watching him repair old logic boards. I have the AmScope SM-4NTP-144 microscope which he recommends - it’s almost like a superpower for me.
I recently discovered his channel 😀 Thanks for the tip with the microscope. I'll be reviewing one of these LCD screen microscopes soon, gaining more experience...
I was vaguely aware of PhysX but I never owned a dedicated card until a few years ago when I bought a Dell XPS 720 from eBay which came with a PCI variant of the card but I never used it.
PhysX remains to be a very unusual thing. I was super interested in Ageia (uhjee-uh) cards, but they were quickly overtaken in performance by the built in PhysX with nVidia GPU solutions. I had a GTX285 SLI with a GTX275 as dedicated PhysX, and I think the only game I ever really saw take advantage of it in that time period was Batman, and it wasn't much extra other than some smoke from tires and some particles here and there. There were more tech demos than games. As far as SMD soldering goes, I prefer paste and hot air. It's not too hard to tack a leg with the iron, after positioning it with the tweezers, then just blow hot air to suck all that paste/flux onto the metal. The only thing you need to worry about, is heat boiling the electrolyte in the capacitor, but then you shouldn't be going that hot, or doing a pass for very long. I've repaired a lot of SMD with just a soldering iron, and when doing that, the more sputtering flux, the better to really make sure those joints are good. You don't even really need to use specifically a SMD capacitor for an SMD repair either, but I'm sure you're aware of that. Often times it can be easier to just bend over a regular electrolytic, and even in some circumstances if you're increasing the farads to provide more of a buffer or a noise cleaning application, that's really your only option because of SMD pad spacing. You should also be a little more careful with allowing your wick to stick like that, that is a real good way to rip pads off of the PCB. Either use shorter amounts of wick so it can't cool down as rapidly, or move quicker with more flux added to the wick.
an alternative to flux paste is smd flux, which is a liquid that looks like water, and i dont know if you use lead free solder, but i find lead free so much harder to work with. i got a big box of 2 rools of some old vintage solder wire from ebay , and for very small stuff i use WBT 0820, the real one, the expensive one :-P i have 3 solder irons, one purely for brute force heating ,one for specials occasions where i need extra head but on a smaller tip, and my personal favorite is TS80P, because its so versatile, only nitpick is if you use a usbc cable with a very long connection, you will wiggle the cable off , so dont use a thick and heavy cable. this is only my use cases and favorites, so just keep practice and happy soldering.
I was never aware of PhysX being a PCIe thing. I remember it as being PCI cards intended to be paired with AGP video cards. But the whole thing always seemed a bit tenuous to me. I never had any interest in owning a PhysX card.
I remember back then (Around late 2008/early 2009) seeing the marketing being plastered all over the nVidia boxes for PhysX. I was on the market to get a gaming GPU to go with my Phenom based machine and settled on a PNY single slot 8800GT 512mb and wondered what the advertising on the box was all about regarding the PhysX. I didn't know what I know now but it did intrigue me at the time. Sent me down a few rabbit holes over the years lol :D If I remember correctly I think the Unreal engine had some features regarding PhysX. Could be wrong though!
Make sure you use leaded solder because it's easier to solder, and if you use cheap flux you need to put so much on that it submerges the joint. Caig/Deoxit flux makes soldering a lot easier, it's just the rosin in hard to clean afterwards.
I remember running my gtx 560ti alongside my 7970 back in the days solely to use it as a dedicated physx card for games like mafia 2 back then. Did so till the point i bought a rx 280 to run with my 7970 in crossfire, i simply ran out of space for the 560ti.. and really physx was for the most part just a gimmick anyways that you only really cared about in very few games anyways. As either it wasn´t that big of a deal or most of the games i played didn´t even have physx but used a different physics engine.
5:40 Needle soldering tips (especially on Hakko900 type iron) not useful for this kind of work. Use more heat transferring types, like 900M-T-3.2D or 900M-T-KZ
More modern cards are a huge pain to solder on, lead free solder with higher melting point+very thick PCBs with good thermal conductivity make for a terrible experience. The main trick (does apply to desoldering 386/486 boards too!) is preheating the board, with a heat gun for example. Makes a huge difference. Also using leaded solder for the repair makes it easier.
Borderlands 2 was the game that I used PhysX on the most. I also spent a lot of time in that game but it all felt gimmicky, especially when it came to the way fluid objects like water, blood splats liquid etc etc were displayed... I didnt use an Ageia PhysX card. I was running two GTX680s at the time so one was dedicated to physX. I played a lot BL2 with the physX settings both on and off and in the end I just left it off... Not because it was tanking my performance but I honestly didnt see the point. Also at that present time I was running a 2500k that was clocked at 4.9Ghz or a 3930k@4.8Ghz. I didnt get to get on the PhysX bandwagon because I was poor and by the time BL2 was out in 2012 I was basically working 70hrs+ a week with very little time off to spend what I earned so I put a lot of it into building a strong PC that I could enjoy on my days off.
It was kind of funny that BL3 looked noticeably inferior to BL2 due to the lack of PhysX, it was the same with Metro 2 and 3. It's a shame developers abandoned it (well, a shame Nvidia stopped paying them to add it lol).
@@llynellyn I never got onboard with BL3. I thought Randy Pitchford was a bit of a twat and no longer wanted to support him or his studio. From all the game footage I saw on youtube. I wasnt that impressed either. It was more like BL2.5 or something
Thought this stuff was so cool back in the day, the Unreal Tournament 3 maps you could get with PhysX were awesome! Until your friends PCs bogged down to a crawl because they didn't have nVidia graphics cards... Well it was great for me at least.
Quick tip, wick transfers heat very quickly, using the roll sucks up heat like a groundplane, tweezers an a small piece is the way to go.. also, use 60/40 solder.. silver solder takes a lot more heat to wet, old pcbs usuall used 60/40 so mixing solder composition makes it harder aswell.. using a knife or chissel head is a lot easier to do smd and wick with, pencil tip do not deliver enough heat
I miss PhysX, so awesome. After Nvidia bought it they had a legit reason to buy their cards over AMD and they threw it away to reduce dev time, sad. It's kinda comical that the 3rd Borderlands/Metro games both looked worse than the 2nd ones due to the removal of PhysX :P
I actually never had a game that was PhysX specific, nor I had to have one, I somehow managed to skip that technology during XP and Vista era. I seemed to be remembering Ageia itself from somewhere... Not sure where though. I just remember seeing their logo.
For good results when soldering, use a good quality solder. I can't see any information on your chinese solder. I suggest you use 63/37 % Sn/Pb from a well known vendor. Now I use some from Sain Smart, and I'm very happy with it. MG Chemical is very good too.
yeah that confused me too pci+e was in its infancy at the time, PhyXs cards wherent commonly known on pci+e there where PCI cards, I had a BFG card back in the day, it was impressive for a very short while then Nvidia being Nvidia bought them out, its a wonder they havent bought out AMD
I had a 8600GT as a PhysX card besides my 8800GTS 512, but I cant even remember how good or bad it worked, so I guess it did'nt do that big a difference in most games. I probably got it for benchmarking or something just as stupid. But it was a fun time for PCs :)
I always loved this concept, tho to be fair I'm somewhat baised since I'm a physisist lol. Got two, one of these OEM PCIe boards and a retail PCI version that lives in my P4EE system
buying a soldering station might help. it seems to me, that the board is not getting warm enough. a good soldering equpment will automaticly "heat more" when something big (like a pcb) must be (pre-)heated. Thanks for your clips. i love watching them for years now.
For a while you could get a boost from running your old GPU (if you had upgraded) as a dedicated PhysX card. I did that for a short time after my college laptop died around 2015 and I built a PC from old parts. I had a 660ti and a Q6600 and my friend gave me his old 460 to use for PhysX. Worked surprisingly well for it's age. I played a lot of Overwatch on that hunk of junk.
Conical tips are pretty bad for soldering unless you need to solder tiny SMD stuff. For this size, any chisel tip or anything with more mass at the end should help.
OMG i had one of these!! This exact card pulled from a dell unit. I even water cooled it (because i could). I used it with mirrors edge, but to be brutally honest, it didn't go great. It allowed some fancy fabric animations but tanked frame rate.
For surface mount caps I see a lot of people using kapton tape to protect surrounding components and a hot air station. I was thinking about getting one of those.
Phil, I just purchased Windows Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1. Does this support an SSD, or would a mechanical hard drive be better? Thanks for the help. 😃
There are a handful of games that only support Ageia PPU cards for PhysX, and not Nvidia GPU driver PhysX. The most notable being Tom Clancy's GRAW... Which does look amazing with extra debris flying everywhere. But the experience of this one game is not worth the hassle for anybody not a collector.
If you have an old pc with a 9800gt/gtx 260 etc and a new pc then install Batman Arkham Asylum. You'll notice that a LOT of the "PhysXs" "elements" (newspapers blowing around etc) are now gone despite the newer pc being a LOT more (I used a 4080 Super)
Soldering can be a long journey. Video cards are the absolute nastiest thing to solder though, because they're heavily multilayered and there's a lot of inner pours. Especially if you're soldering a capacitor across a power rail both of those pads will be heatsunk into the bulk of the PCB and the heatsinking on the ground pad is especially strong since it can go into multiple stitched pours. Mainboards are only 4 layers usually which is also not necessarily easy. I see discolouration accumulating quickly on the soldering iron. Which one is it? Those blue ones with a dial from beginner kits are not suitable, especially if you don't have 20 years of experience, because the dial doesn't set temperature, but power (the temperature numbers printed don't mean anything), so when they're idle they overheat a lot (and discolour like that) and when you touch down on the metal they instantly get cold and can't get themselves back up. For multilayer board SMD soldering, something like a T12 station is ideal (about 70-80W and monolithic heater cartridge-tip) and use a heavy tip with large thermal mass and large touch down area such as a wide chisel tip or a K tip (knife shaped).
PhysX looked so promising. But as compute operations on GPUs were so powerful in that era, there wasn't much need for separate hardware. And it wasn't doing enough to the heavy lifting to make synchronizing all your devices all that much faster. It's the trap you can fall into with specialized hardware during a time of rapid tech evolution.
For a while i was running first a Radeon HD 4870 X2, then an HD 6950, then an HD 7870 XT, and GTS 250 together with the 250 being dedicated solely to PhysX. I had fun playing around with that in some games, but it was not something i really missed after a while. Nvidia just kept making it more of a pain to run solely PhysX on their GPU's, no new games were being released that took advantage of it, and I kept getting good deals on Radeons, so that was that. I briefly played with it again when i was using an RXT 3080, but someone offered a cash and trade for an RX 6900 XT and I very much preferred to have the extra 6GB more of VRAM, so I haven't messed with it again since then. It was a fun feature, but ultimately it was surpassed and phased out.
I can't remember the name of it, but I remember there was the game that was a sort of tech-demo too, I think you were just in one level, but you had like powers to throw stuff around and of course it looked amazing with the physx effects, although just as you say the GPU still got more work to do, so even with a PhysX card in your system it ran quite poorly. I still have the one I bought, a BFG one for PCI, but the die is damanged slightly and I see some missing SMD's so I don't have much hope of it working, just kicking myself for letting it happen, I really liked the idea.
G'day Phil, While it was a bit of a fail for specifically for the card it's self I still found the video enjoyable & very interesting learning the history of PhysX, At least with your soldering you do not shake like me so with some practice & maybe a Solder Station with a heat bed 🙃👎Champion Level I still give soldering a go with some things but tiny stuff 😬, I have a PowerColor HD7770 PCS+ & RX6600 I want to get fixed but am a bit worried I may kill them doing them myself so as this video has triggered the thought just wondering if you know of anyone in Australia that does PC Parts repairs like these 🤷♂???
I remember being at a tech show and saw the Ageia booth showcasing the card and what it would bring to design and gaming. I still think nVidia's purchase of PhysX has kinda gimped it when they decided to combine it all in one card.
All the Batman games since Arkham Asylum support Physx. Also, SLI, until they removed it in Knight to "fix it" (the broken game on PC). Later, when I got more powerful cards, I would use the second card for Physx instead of SLI. Games ran so much smoother with everything cranked to max settings. I remember the Catwoman DLC in City tanking the fps when you go in the vault with all the money floating around. Me playing it in 3D on my PC didn't help it either, lol!
Thank you! I'm gaining practice with soldering kits and started doing some basic repairs in old motherboards. I'll revisit this card once I've leveled up, like a boss fight 😅
I wish I knew where mine had gone to - I remember getting that with a DELL machine, back when it was still fresh in the market (.. and I still bothered to buy from DELL)
Alice Madness Returns was only game had back in the day that used PhsyX and it could tank fps bad even with tweaked config file and dedicating one GTX280 for PhsyX. Also just a weird fact Sega implemented PhsyX in their game NGS but strangely its forced to CPU only.
I remember these cards and people with mixed opinions on it. Some people claiming these were the future and it seemed like maybe every pc would have one. Then nvidia purchasing them and people thinking this was going to shut out AMD out of a huge market. I remember having a second video card that ran my other monitors and did physx acceleration. That was the closest I had to a card for physx. Granted I didn't play many games that even supported physx at the time. I played mafia 2, chivalry and alice: madness returns. I had to look up a list to remember. So I mean I briefly played these titles, not enough to be significant. I wish skyrim's havok engine for physx had this acceleration. I did all I could to maximize that game. I was quite glad when physx mostly died out and games didn't go with a proprietary engine and I was glad when the additional cards didn't suddenly become a requirement of all pc gamers. I remember there was a batman game that came out and just was a complete mess, the performance was awful and people were hating on the company for it. While I wasn't a fan of the genre, I just remember getting intrigued into that it turned out most of it's problems weren't of the developers themselves, it was the mess nvidia's physx was causing. I remember after all the damage it caused to the studios reputation and they were getting hit hard for it over the disaster, in the end it was largely due to having to code around nvidia's physx, that turned out to be the culprit. I remember physx was dying out by then. Sure it still existed for a few games after, but it just felt better if it died for all games to enjoy non physx physics. However I guess nvidia opensourced it making it available to everyone. I do remember long after physx cards became obsolete, people still had wondered if they were worthwhile, because they still had one. Even seeing youtube videos of their usefulness, turns out they were long since useless.
I remember this only because it was the Nvidia user's snub at us ATI guys. I didn't know what I was missing evidently. They have ray-tracing to brag up now. I am sitting here saying "I've been here before".
Microphone placement is perfect. Looks and sounds great! As for PhysX, I remember wanting one for Mirror's Edge, as one scene with a draped cloth dropped the framerate into single digits without one.
Capacitors just falling off is a sign of leakage. The electrolyte inside of electrolytic capacitors is corrosive. The corrosion will resist solder even with good flux, so after removing the old solder, you may want to scrub the area with a toothbrush and isopropyl alcohol. In the worst cases, some extra abrasion will be needed to really scratch at the pads to remove the metal oxide layer. But that's about the only real thing that would prevent solder from easily taking to pads and component legs when using flux. If you plan on really getting into repairing old cards, a can of a de-oxidizing agent like Deoxit would be a worthwhile investment.
>about the only real thing
other than using sharp needle 900M-T-B? tip in a aliexpress 45W clone station.
He has shown that those are solid polymer caps.
There is literally nothing to leak lol
@@lorenzoporciani Exactly, poly are solid, ie, no liquid.
If you see a SMD cap with splits on top it's prob electrolytic, ie, if it over heats it needs to pop on top, but no splits are usually solid.
I'm glad you posted the repair attempt despite the lack of success. The history and analysis is spot on, demonstrating just how these cards really were a flash in the pan.
I missed the Aegis PhysX card bandwagon but I did get my feet wet later with a spare PCIe 1x GTX 520 card I picked up for a different project. It really enhanced the particulates and rubble in the game "World in Conflict". Beyond that, I didn't explore PhysX too much. My GPU at the time was a GTX 460 Ti.
GTX 460 Ti doesn't exist. Maybe you had a 460 or a 560 Ti?
@@RuruFINYou're right. I looked at the box for my card and it is just a GTX 460.
My brain erroneously added the 'Ti'.
Great game, runs pretty well today. Beat it using my 2080ti 😅.
It was an awesome experience
@@roveradventures What a coincidence, I'm playing it currently. Great environment destruction model, graphics still hold up and have one of the better plots in RTS. The only issue is the bug with one of the config files, you must delete it every time you run the game, otherwise your fps would drop to low levels.
@krazownik3139 forcing dx11 is also a thing for better visuals. I'm gonna try gpu passthrough with a W5000 and let my 2080ti render. See if I can play it on a 1600x1200 CRT that dosent play nice with adapters.
Call of duty 2, Crimson skies, battlefield 2, halo 1 via disc. Loads of games I still got in a bookshelf on sleeves to play. Need for speeds galore.
I really should get into gaming vids. It's nice revisiting stuff from my childhood. My last pc had a 8500GT and a dual core Athlon with windows XP service pack 3.
Still works, Dad built it for me and I still have his older pcs around too. Those are another story though.
There is a gtx 275 "PhysX" edition that also has a gts 250 on it that just handles the "PhysX".
Wow that is interesting 😊
I remember that card, definitely interesting
Woah, had no idea that there was a card like that!
I LOVE your lab. It's very plain and stark, allowing you to focus on the work without distraction. I've been moving in this direction for over a year now. ❤
iirc CellFactor was the one single best physx demo game at the time. with gravity grenades and destructible environments, tons of physics props to play with lying around everywhere, it was glorious
It really helps if you use a heatgun to heat up the pcb before soldering smds. Its often a lack of heat if you are struggling with it.
I remember, I then had 3 GPUs, 2 in sli and one for dedicated physx back in ddr2 with an nforce board. What a waste of money
and nowadays we have companies trying to pull the same schtick with NPUs, AI accelerators, etc. the more things change the more they stay the same
@@oggilein1 we will probably have standalone AI accelerator cards from Nvidia, intel and the like to go along with our GPU.
It would not surprise me in the slightest.
@@roveradventures standalone ai accelerators are already a thing.
and WD Velociraptor HDDs, don't forget those :P
@charlesdorval394 didn't have that. But my seagate drive worked perfectly after a near 10-12 year hiatus 🤣. The old Matrox drive still does too. It has SP2. But it's a lil..crunchy.
Tip for solver wick: Cut off a short strip and hold it with a tweezer. The longer strip you use the more heat it sucks away from your soldering attempt. You need to practice a bit to get a feel for it. And don't forget to use fresh flux so it helps adhering the molten solder to the wick.
5:36 for these large SMD capacitors, the heat is being wicked away by the board, especially on the ground side. You need to heat the board to a decent temperature so it won't pull heat away from your soldering iron and allow solder to flow correctly otherwise the attachment will be precarious and the cap might break off again.
Also using bigger tip with more heat capacity may help in some cases without going to heating board first
Most PCIe cards have large ground plane which make soldering on them extremely hard without preheating the board, investing in proper setup isn't probably wise thing to do when that isn't something you do for living but even cheap small preheaters from places like aliexpress will make your life easier when you need to do stuff like that.
Physx on Borderlands 2 still lags on current day CPU's. The FPS can drop down to 40 when a lot of effects/particles are being calculated. I heard because it was because it's single threaded, or they forced it single threaded in the Pirate Booty update.
Such a shame it was never fixed.
Even modern CPU are way too weak to simulate those physics effects properly, CPU can't run 3560 threads at the same time, GPU and PPU can. But CPU has branch prediction, larger caches which are also shared between the cores, etc. They are too different and ment for different code. It's a myth that internet created that somebody ran PPU effects on a modern CPU. You can install Cell Factor and have like 10 fps on physics heavy levels on a modern CPU. Physx games usually had separate mode for CPU only, which ment much less Physx on the screen. And that's probably where those great stories came out, that somebody played Physx fine on a CPU.)
@homersimpson8955 I never mentioned Physx being calculated only on CPU. The BL2 problem occurs with the iteration of Physx on being "accelerated" on GPU.
...and modern CPUs have only slightly helped with the FPS on BL2 with Physx being set to high(accelerated on the same GPU)....so there is some issue there.
@@homersimpson8955most often game that use gpu physics use overkill physics effect. Sometimes it even make things looks much worse. Planetside 2 did try to use those effect in the end they only give advantage to players that cannot see those effects. They decided not to support gpu physx at all after that.
A rare moment i feel well versed on a video topic to share.
Part of the issue with the original ppu was that the only publicly available version of it was on PCI. Granted, a fair bet for the systems of the time. But there was never a pcie version released, to the public. The only ppu on pcie that i am aware of, were on some rarified notebooks. The only manufacturer that sticks out as having a notebook PPU was... Alienware. Moving on...
One notable game that uses PhysX well on pc, was Arkham Asylum. It has a dedicated toggle for the PhysX feature, and even calls out the minimum level of graphics and hardware needed to rnable the feature and maintain performance. That said, I'm more surprised that a lot of games that were also on console used the PhysX API more frequently on the consoles. That said, for pc games that use and support the feature, the _dedicatd physx card_ mode soon became the way to go. Last i looked into it, a gtx 750ti as a dedicated physx card was all you needed, in order to max out any game that used the feature.
Mirror's Edge and Mafia II also had some cool PhysX effects that still look pretty great nowadays!
Yeah the first thing I noticed was the PCI-E on his card, new to me !
@@BurningFishGaming Ditto for Arkham City, Arkham Knight and Borderlands 2.
@@charlesdorval394 I didn't notice it until I rewatched the video at home. Where the @#$% did he get his?! 🤯
@@ZeroHourProductions407I bought it on eBay...
Those cards are virtually absent nowadays or very expensive. It's usually a better idea to buy an old 8600GT or GT210 that are cheap and do work fine as a dedicated PhysX controller.
Also note that it was possible back in the days to use an ATI/AMD as your main graphics controller coupled with an NVIDIA for PhysX. They updated their drivers to block that, but it's always possible to find a workaround.
PhysX was widely used in countless game such as Mass Effect 2 but in a "basic" mode that could work on CPUs and home consoles.
Only a few games such as Batman Arkham Asylum, Alice Madness Returns, Mirrors Edge.... had support for more advanced PhysX effects that CPUs could not handle. Plus, it was only cosmetic and did not rendered that well (I remember fog that looked like cotton).
I think you should feel satisfied. You made the card better and work that's a win. I've dmg boards and made them worse, but I didn't give up and learnt to re fix it and eventually made thr board work. That's with smd stuff too.
A great channel to watch is mr solder fix. He has a few on smd components
I actually owned one of those, And while it did improve PhysX in Mafia 2,I later added a secondary 8800GT as a dedicated PhysX card which as you can imagine totally blew away this PhysX card, But without the Agia technology it would be interesting how modern cards handled PhysX.
Your video really took me back. I also wanted to mention that Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare (GRAW) was one of the first games I played that utilized the Ageia card in game.
I wanted one of those cards so badly, and then was dismayed to see them bought by Nvidia.
Same.
If nvidia did not bought them they probably no longer exist. Just think about it logically. Back then then majority of games are using havok. Suddenly Aegia comes out with those PhysX card that only support limited amount of games. As a small company they did not even have the mean to make majority of game developer out there to switch to their PhysX from havok. With very handful of games that can use those PPU they were bound to fail to begin with in similar way how those EAX failed to be integrated in many games.
Me too!
A physics card? Interesting
Speaking of Nvidia thanks to the FX 5200 installed into a slot one pentium III I've been tinkering with after rough 20 years I finally get to experience playing Jedi Knigt Dark Forces II, Mystery of the Sith, and TIE Fighter95 with 3d acceleration enabled. I'd forgotten just how much better Jedi looks with it on. Xwing at TIE do have a graphical glitch much like the one you showed in the video with the cards first boot, Xwing's in flight menu when you press Esc and TIE when you end a mission and return to base. Not sure if its a virtual cds I made of the game discs using the retail software from back then (Its celled I copier Gamer edition) or the card switching modes.
The only thing the system is lacking now is dos game sound compatibility. The too long didn't read is the sound blaster Live Vaule card I found on FB Market place turned out to be a Dell oem, I didn't even know Acer,Compaq, and Dell had OEM live cards. The other problem is the Asus motherboard has a VIA cbipset one that doesnt like Live series cards...
Right now I'm using a card from Amazon (I forget the model number) the software says C multimedia, card works for windows even supports pre EAX 3d audio BUT the Dos support is spotty. FM synth doesnt work (or I'm lacking the Phil level knowledge to get it working lol) however the midi support does work. It has Roland SC wave table and sounds quite nice. Unfortunately the card also lacks a cd audio header so the period correct rebadged samsung cd drive I used in the machine well have to wait to get its cd audio cable plugged in
The plan to address the spund card issue is to take advantage of the motherboards single ISA slot with ether a SB pro 2.0, a 16 or AWE series card,I'm hoping I can use the two cards without them fighting over DMA' etc. In the meantime it's game on like its the 90s!
Edit
Almost forgort the Amazon cards game port doesn't seen to work or it's only a midi port so ISA slot Sound Blaster would be needed for that too so I can grt my Gravis joystick/gamepad pros working
Mysteries of the Sith has got to be my favorite Star Wars game, and I never see anyone mention it!
As for your sound card woes- I run an AWE64 Value and Audigy2 ZS in my P3 system. The only downside is the AWE64 doesn't have real OPL3. It's hard to find the "perfect" SB16 since all of them are flawed in some way and you just pick your poison. However, the Yamaha YMF724 and 744 have true OPL and are among the best PCI cards for DOS support.
@PhAyzoN Jedi Knight Dark Forces II is my favourite I'm afraid Mystery of the Sith is my least favourite of the series part of it is going from the live action cut sceens to the 3d ones with no moving mouths lol. Thanks for the sound card suggestions I didn'trealize the Audigy 2 cards had 9x support I thought only the first gen cards did. I may swap the Amazon card for an Audigy at some point but first things first a ISA slot Sound card is going in there... or one of the pci cards you mentioned
It's a fun hobby isn't it? Especially the hunting down of parts and then seeing the improvements like 3D graphics or EAX sound...
@philscomputerlab lol yup it's been interesting working on my first retro build (and only 2nd machine I've ever built) alot of ups and downs
I remember watching Physx demos a ton but never had one of these cards, then by the time I had disposable income Nvidia already bought them.
I thought about buying one for my retro PCs but its in the awkward era for me in that it supports games I can mostly get to run fine on modern systems.
I purchased one of these cards that is for PCI not PCIe back in 2005 and I don't remember what I gave for it but it still works fine with ATI/AMD cards too! Never had any issue with it.
Glad to see that you have one! I have used this card on win10 too. Use lead based solder too.
I remember all the hype around PhysX back then, but I honestly don't recall discrete processing cards for the feature. Very cool video, Phil!
I remember that many of PC-oriented magazines in my country complained that we'd need more PCIe slots for all those cards (GPU, sound and finally Physics Processing Unit [PPU] as they were called).
My 2007 gaming laptop had one of these plus SLI,so it had three graphics cards!
That's amazing in a laptop 😊
Well done Phill! you will get better with time soldering. I did
yeah if you are into retro hardware there is no way around a little soldering from time to time ;)
I have this card and made a post about it on Vogons. It looks like your diagnostics got farther than my card - mine just fails outright. I thought that maybe the issue was that the card needs to be in an actual Dell XPS machine from the era due to some kind of firmware lock. However, as someone mentioned in the thread, it's possible my particular card might just be dead as well. I'm hoping to find one of those old Dells to test out my theory one of these days.
Oh nice, well, not nice, but shared pain helps 😅 I'll try levelling up with my soldering skills and then want to do a full recap and carefully check all the traces and everything. If the card is OEM locked, that would be a huge pain and makes diagnostics difficult. Does your fan start spinning after booting?
@@philscomputerlab I didn't check since the card was detected without any issue and showed up in device manager. I ended up packing it away for another time because I wanted to use the computer (late era XP build) for some games and didn't want to risk the card creating issues since it wasn't working properly.
My Dell XPS theory is partly based on the drivers available on Dell's site (had to do a Google search to find them). Some drivers looked like they were for laptops, so I skipped those. The pages I found listed some compatible models for the drivers (don't remember the exact model numbers). They installed fine on my non Dell PC, but sadly didn't make any difference as far as functionality. Might be something for you to try if you haven't, since your card seems to be closer to working than mine.
@@philscomputerlab I left kind of a long reply to this, but I guess TH-cam decided it was spam. You can probably find it in YT Studio, but the short version is I never checked the fan because it showed up fine in device manager and drivers installed without issue.
Switchball's a game I like quite a bit that supports this. Pretty solid marble game that's much more focused on puzzles and physics than stuff like Marble Blast and Monkey Ball.
Imagine having separate Ray Tracing card for PCI-E x1 slot to pair with any other GPU
forgot that it came from a separate company, good video
I still have an Asus pci version from 2006, never really used it, would like to test it one day.
Thanks for the video Phil! I also am learning SMD soldering. Bruce from Branchus Creations has a video called “Beginner's Guide to Soldering Electronics Part 3: Surface Mount Soldering” which you might find useful. I have really improved my technique watching him repair old logic boards. I have the AmScope SM-4NTP-144 microscope which he recommends - it’s almost like a superpower for me.
I recently discovered his channel 😀 Thanks for the tip with the microscope. I'll be reviewing one of these LCD screen microscopes soon, gaining more experience...
I was vaguely aware of PhysX but I never owned a dedicated card until a few years ago when I bought a Dell XPS 720 from eBay which came with a PCI variant of the card but I never used it.
PhysX remains to be a very unusual thing. I was super interested in Ageia (uhjee-uh) cards, but they were quickly overtaken in performance by the built in PhysX with nVidia GPU solutions. I had a GTX285 SLI with a GTX275 as dedicated PhysX, and I think the only game I ever really saw take advantage of it in that time period was Batman, and it wasn't much extra other than some smoke from tires and some particles here and there. There were more tech demos than games.
As far as SMD soldering goes, I prefer paste and hot air. It's not too hard to tack a leg with the iron, after positioning it with the tweezers, then just blow hot air to suck all that paste/flux onto the metal. The only thing you need to worry about, is heat boiling the electrolyte in the capacitor, but then you shouldn't be going that hot, or doing a pass for very long. I've repaired a lot of SMD with just a soldering iron, and when doing that, the more sputtering flux, the better to really make sure those joints are good. You don't even really need to use specifically a SMD capacitor for an SMD repair either, but I'm sure you're aware of that. Often times it can be easier to just bend over a regular electrolytic, and even in some circumstances if you're increasing the farads to provide more of a buffer or a noise cleaning application, that's really your only option because of SMD pad spacing. You should also be a little more careful with allowing your wick to stick like that, that is a real good way to rip pads off of the PCB. Either use shorter amounts of wick so it can't cool down as rapidly, or move quicker with more flux added to the wick.
Thanks for the pointers, I've got a lot to learn 😊
an alternative to flux paste is smd flux, which is a liquid that looks like water, and i dont know if you use lead free solder, but i find lead free so much harder to work with. i got a big box of 2 rools of some old vintage solder wire from ebay , and for very small stuff i use WBT 0820, the real one, the expensive one :-P
i have 3 solder irons, one purely for brute force heating ,one for specials occasions where i need extra head but on a smaller tip, and my personal favorite is TS80P, because its so versatile, only nitpick is if you use a usbc cable with a very long connection, you will wiggle the cable off , so dont use a thick and heavy cable.
this is only my use cases and favorites, so just keep practice and happy soldering.
I'll look into SMD specific flux. I've watched many TH-cam videos and it's so beautiful to watch how the solder flows and moves to just the pins...
Thanks for the video! informative. brought back to memory an interesting episode of computer history
i currently use a 4070ti as a dedicated physx card for the 5 games that support it. they finnally let you use amd and nvidia gpus together again
I still have a PCI version of one of these cards somewhere. Never saw one that’s PCIe.
I was never aware of PhysX being a PCIe thing. I remember it as being PCI cards intended to be paired with AGP video cards. But the whole thing always seemed a bit tenuous to me. I never had any interest in owning a PhysX card.
I remember back then (Around late 2008/early 2009) seeing the marketing being plastered all over the nVidia boxes for PhysX. I was on the market to get a gaming GPU to go with my Phenom based machine and settled on a PNY single slot 8800GT 512mb and wondered what the advertising on the box was all about regarding the PhysX. I didn't know what I know now but it did intrigue me at the time. Sent me down a few rabbit holes over the years lol :D If I remember correctly I think the Unreal engine had some features regarding PhysX. Could be wrong though!
Make sure you use leaded solder because it's easier to solder, and if you use cheap flux you need to put so much on that it submerges the joint. Caig/Deoxit flux makes soldering a lot easier, it's just the rosin in hard to clean afterwards.
I remember running my gtx 560ti alongside my 7970 back in the days solely to use it as a dedicated physx card for games like mafia 2 back then. Did so till the point i bought a rx 280 to run with my 7970 in crossfire, i simply ran out of space for the 560ti.. and really physx was for the most part just a gimmick anyways that you only really cared about in very few games anyways. As either it wasn´t that big of a deal or most of the games i played didn´t even have physx but used a different physics engine.
arkham asylum and mirrors edge physx implementations were incredibly cool. still best ways to play them
5:40 Needle soldering tips (especially on Hakko900 type iron) not useful for this kind of work. Use more heat transferring types, like 900M-T-3.2D or 900M-T-KZ
I switched to a 3.2D now 😊
Yes! I still have mine! The big tech demo of the time was Cell Factor. It would be cool if you did a video on that.
More modern cards are a huge pain to solder on, lead free solder with higher melting point+very thick PCBs with good thermal conductivity make for a terrible experience. The main trick (does apply to desoldering 386/486 boards too!) is preheating the board, with a heat gun for example. Makes a huge difference. Also using leaded solder for the repair makes it easier.
AH-GEE-AH. ;)
Great vid Phil! Always fun to see you do repairs too! Hope you keep pushing forward with that too!
I still got mine, was wondering a while ago if it still has any usage?
Borderlands 2 was the game that I used PhysX on the most. I also spent a lot of time in that game but it all felt gimmicky, especially when it came to the way fluid objects like water, blood splats liquid etc etc were displayed... I didnt use an Ageia PhysX card. I was running two GTX680s at the time so one was dedicated to physX. I played a lot BL2 with the physX settings both on and off and in the end I just left it off... Not because it was tanking my performance but I honestly didnt see the point.
Also at that present time I was running a 2500k that was clocked at 4.9Ghz or a 3930k@4.8Ghz. I didnt get to get on the PhysX bandwagon because I was poor and by the time BL2 was out in 2012 I was basically working 70hrs+ a week with very little time off to spend what I earned so I put a lot of it into building a strong PC that I could enjoy on my days off.
It was kind of funny that BL3 looked noticeably inferior to BL2 due to the lack of PhysX, it was the same with Metro 2 and 3. It's a shame developers abandoned it (well, a shame Nvidia stopped paying them to add it lol).
@@llynellyn I never got onboard with BL3. I thought Randy Pitchford was a bit of a twat and no longer wanted to support him or his studio. From all the game footage I saw on youtube. I wasnt that impressed either. It was more like BL2.5 or something
3:08 Red means scary BIOS
Thought this stuff was so cool back in the day, the Unreal Tournament 3 maps you could get with PhysX were awesome!
Until your friends PCs bogged down to a crawl because they didn't have nVidia graphics cards... Well it was great for me at least.
There's a rare prototype of a second generation PhysX PPU card with twice the performance. Search with "physx 200 maplewood" in Google to see details.
Quick tip, wick transfers heat very quickly, using the roll sucks up heat like a groundplane, tweezers an a small piece is the way to go.. also, use 60/40 solder.. silver solder takes a lot more heat to wet, old pcbs usuall used 60/40 so mixing solder composition makes it harder aswell.. using a knife or chissel head is a lot easier to do smd and wick with, pencil tip do not deliver enough heat
I miss PhysX, so awesome. After Nvidia bought it they had a legit reason to buy their cards over AMD and they threw it away to reduce dev time, sad. It's kinda comical that the 3rd Borderlands/Metro games both looked worse than the 2nd ones due to the removal of PhysX :P
Yeah, remember those. Funny how Asus reused their mid-end GPU coolers with their PhysX cards.
There is an easter egg about Ageia de facto passing away (bought by nVidia) in Witcher 2. ;)
Nice!
I remember being blown away by falling cubes.
I remember reading articles about it and what a fascinating technology it was for me at the time.
I still got this card. Loved playing GRAW with it!
I actually never had a game that was PhysX specific, nor I had to have one, I somehow managed to skip that technology during XP and Vista era.
I seemed to be remembering Ageia itself from somewhere... Not sure where though. I just remember seeing their logo.
For good results when soldering, use a good quality solder.
I can't see any information on your chinese solder.
I suggest you use 63/37 % Sn/Pb from a well known vendor. Now I use some from Sain Smart, and I'm very happy with it.
MG Chemical is very good too.
Yes it's 63/37 😊
I always thought nVidia created PhysX and never knew about Ageia until now. Thanks! Good video.
yeah that confused me too pci+e was in its infancy at the time, PhyXs cards wherent commonly known on pci+e there where PCI cards, I had a BFG card back in the day, it was impressive for a very short while then Nvidia being Nvidia bought them out, its a wonder they havent bought out AMD
I had a 8600GT as a PhysX card besides my 8800GTS 512, but I cant even remember how good or bad it worked, so I guess it did'nt do that big a difference in most games. I probably got it for benchmarking or something just as stupid. But it was a fun time for PCs :)
Thrine is a beauty of a game that used that tech 🤗
I always loved this concept, tho to be fair I'm somewhat baised since I'm a physisist lol. Got two, one of these OEM PCIe boards and a retail PCI version that lives in my P4EE system
buying a soldering station might help. it seems to me, that the board is not getting warm enough. a good soldering equpment will automaticly "heat more" when something big (like a pcb) must be (pre-)heated. Thanks for your clips. i love watching them for years now.
For a while you could get a boost from running your old GPU (if you had upgraded) as a dedicated PhysX card. I did that for a short time after my college laptop died around 2015 and I built a PC from old parts. I had a 660ti and a Q6600 and my friend gave me his old 460 to use for PhysX. Worked surprisingly well for it's age. I played a lot of Overwatch on that hunk of junk.
Tip for soldering, just use a bigger tip and a decent quallity flux, leaded solder will help too (classic 60/40)!
Conical tips are pretty bad for soldering unless you need to solder tiny SMD stuff. For this size, any chisel tip or anything with more mass at the end should help.
9:30 you could run amd+nvidia also ;)
OMG i had one of these!! This exact card pulled from a dell unit. I even water cooled it (because i could). I used it with mirrors edge, but to be brutally honest, it didn't go great. It allowed some fancy fabric animations but tanked frame rate.
For surface mount caps I see a lot of people using kapton tape to protect surrounding components and a hot air station. I was thinking about getting one of those.
Phil, I just purchased Windows Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1. Does this support an SSD, or would a mechanical hard drive be better? Thanks for the help. 😃
There are a handful of games that only support Ageia PPU cards for PhysX, and not Nvidia GPU driver PhysX.
The most notable being Tom Clancy's GRAW... Which does look amazing with extra debris flying everywhere.
But the experience of this one game is not worth the hassle for anybody not a collector.
That's the game I wanted to showcase!
If you have an old pc with a 9800gt/gtx 260 etc and a new pc then install Batman Arkham Asylum. You'll notice that a LOT of the "PhysXs" "elements" (newspapers blowing around etc) are now gone despite the newer pc being a LOT more (I used a 4080 Super)
Whoa, just what I was thinking about it!
If you happen to have said PC you should definitely upload some footage of it
I definitely want to revisit PhysX with a somewhat better PC. Apparently up to 500 and 600 series should work.
Phil, can you recommend any bootloader, was using xOSL but I stop as XP wasn't running on it.
check for continuity, and maybe if other caps are bad
Flux, if you think there's plenty, add more :P
Good solder, good flux, good WICK is a life saver
(Kesler, chipquik, MG chemicals) hehehe
Thanks for the tips!
I wouldn't feel too bad about your soldering skills if the OG caps straight up fell off the card from the factory.
Tony is cool!
Soldering can be a long journey.
Video cards are the absolute nastiest thing to solder though, because they're heavily multilayered and there's a lot of inner pours. Especially if you're soldering a capacitor across a power rail both of those pads will be heatsunk into the bulk of the PCB and the heatsinking on the ground pad is especially strong since it can go into multiple stitched pours.
Mainboards are only 4 layers usually which is also not necessarily easy.
I see discolouration accumulating quickly on the soldering iron. Which one is it? Those blue ones with a dial from beginner kits are not suitable, especially if you don't have 20 years of experience, because the dial doesn't set temperature, but power (the temperature numbers printed don't mean anything), so when they're idle they overheat a lot (and discolour like that) and when you touch down on the metal they instantly get cold and can't get themselves back up. For multilayer board SMD soldering, something like a T12 station is ideal (about 70-80W and monolithic heater cartridge-tip) and use a heavy tip with large thermal mass and large touch down area such as a wide chisel tip or a K tip (knife shaped).
PhysX looked so promising. But as compute operations on GPUs were so powerful in that era, there wasn't much need for separate hardware. And it wasn't doing enough to the heavy lifting to make synchronizing all your devices all that much faster. It's the trap you can fall into with specialized hardware during a time of rapid tech evolution.
Windows 7 should work with these cards, but honestly a GPU is a better solution.
For a while i was running first a Radeon HD 4870 X2, then an HD 6950, then an HD 7870 XT, and GTS 250 together with the 250 being dedicated solely to PhysX. I had fun playing around with that in some games, but it was not something i really missed after a while. Nvidia just kept making it more of a pain to run solely PhysX on their GPU's, no new games were being released that took advantage of it, and I kept getting good deals on Radeons, so that was that. I briefly played with it again when i was using an RXT 3080, but someone offered a cash and trade for an RX 6900 XT and I very much preferred to have the extra 6GB more of VRAM, so I haven't messed with it again since then. It was a fun feature, but ultimately it was surpassed and phased out.
I can't remember the name of it, but I remember there was the game that was a sort of tech-demo too, I think you were just in one level, but you had like powers to throw stuff around and of course it looked amazing with the physx effects, although just as you say the GPU still got more work to do, so even with a PhysX card in your system it ran quite poorly.
I still have the one I bought, a BFG one for PCI, but the die is damanged slightly and I see some missing SMD's so I don't have much hope of it working, just kicking myself for letting it happen, I really liked the idea.
G'day Phil,
While it was a bit of a fail for specifically for the card it's self I still found the video enjoyable & very interesting learning the history of PhysX,
At least with your soldering you do not shake like me so with some practice & maybe a Solder Station with a heat bed 🙃👎Champion Level
I still give soldering a go with some things but tiny stuff 😬, I have a PowerColor HD7770 PCS+ & RX6600 I want to get fixed but am a bit worried I may kill them doing them myself so as this video has triggered the thought just wondering if you know of anyone in Australia that does PC Parts repairs like these 🤷♂???
There are a few TH-camrs that do repairs in Australia. I want to level up my skills and then try fixing this card again...
@@philscomputerlab Thanks for the reply phil, do you have the channel names so I can chech them out?
@@philscomputerlab ps no need for link, just the names & I can search I just have had no luck on my own
@shaneeslick Check Branchus Creations
I remember being at a tech show and saw the Ageia booth showcasing the card and what it would bring to design and gaming. I still think nVidia's purchase of PhysX has kinda gimped it when they decided to combine it all in one card.
Cryostasis was the first game I played with advanced PhysX, great game
All the Batman games since Arkham Asylum support Physx. Also, SLI, until they removed it in Knight to "fix it" (the broken game on PC). Later, when I got more powerful cards, I would use the second card for Physx instead of SLI. Games ran so much smoother with everything cranked to max settings. I remember the Catwoman DLC in City tanking the fps when you go in the vault with all the money floating around. Me playing it in 3D on my PC didn't help it either, lol!
Thanks for the video..
Yep, and the irony is by the time I had the expendable income, physx is gone and I don't have time or interest to play games like that anymore
Got a Microscope? If two Caps were busted off, what other damage did it take? If you can spots the damage, that's half the battle!
Thank you! I'm gaining practice with soldering kits and started doing some basic repairs in old motherboards. I'll revisit this card once I've leveled up, like a boss fight 😅
Still have my PhysX card installed in my Pentium 4 system. I just bought it to get the 10 bonus levels in Crazy Machine 2
Could you get a recent AMD GPU and pair a working Ageia PhysX card with it to play the latest games that use Nvidia PhsyX?
Not sure...
Flux is your friend. Use allot of Flux so the solder will flow. Also set your Iron to the melting point of Solder.
I wish I knew where mine had gone to - I remember getting that with a DELL machine, back when it was still fresh in the market (.. and I still bothered to buy from DELL)
I thought they were All PCI, seeing a PCIe one was new for me.
Alice Madness Returns was only game had back in the day that used PhsyX and it could tank fps bad even with tweaked config file and dedicating one GTX280 for PhsyX. Also just a weird fact Sega implemented PhsyX in their game NGS but strangely its forced to CPU only.
I remember these cards and people with mixed opinions on it. Some people claiming these were the future and it seemed like maybe every pc would have one. Then nvidia purchasing them and people thinking this was going to shut out AMD out of a huge market. I remember having a second video card that ran my other monitors and did physx acceleration. That was the closest I had to a card for physx. Granted I didn't play many games that even supported physx at the time. I played mafia 2, chivalry and alice: madness returns. I had to look up a list to remember. So I mean I briefly played these titles, not enough to be significant. I wish skyrim's havok engine for physx had this acceleration. I did all I could to maximize that game.
I was quite glad when physx mostly died out and games didn't go with a proprietary engine and I was glad when the additional cards didn't suddenly become a requirement of all pc gamers. I remember there was a batman game that came out and just was a complete mess, the performance was awful and people were hating on the company for it. While I wasn't a fan of the genre, I just remember getting intrigued into that it turned out most of it's problems weren't of the developers themselves, it was the mess nvidia's physx was causing. I remember after all the damage it caused to the studios reputation and they were getting hit hard for it over the disaster, in the end it was largely due to having to code around nvidia's physx, that turned out to be the culprit. I remember physx was dying out by then. Sure it still existed for a few games after, but it just felt better if it died for all games to enjoy non physx physics. However I guess nvidia opensourced it making it available to everyone.
I do remember long after physx cards became obsolete, people still had wondered if they were worthwhile, because they still had one. Even seeing youtube videos of their usefulness, turns out they were long since useless.
I remember this only because it was the Nvidia user's snub at us ATI guys. I didn't know what I was missing evidently. They have ray-tracing to brag up now. I am sitting here saying "I've been here before".
Microphone placement is perfect. Looks and sounds great!
As for PhysX, I remember wanting one for Mirror's Edge, as one scene with a draped cloth dropped the framerate into single digits without one.