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I bought a $10 Radeon HD 3870 from 2007 โ€” tested it in 2026 (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago by RiskRig91@lemmy.world to c/hardware@lemmy.world
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I picked up a Radeon HD 3870 for $9.90 โ€” seller had no idea what condition it was in, no tests, no returns. Cleaned it, repasted it, threw it in a Core 2 Duo rig and ran benchmarks on CoD4 and Crysis. The temps alone made me nervous. Full video here: https://youtu.be/WuTVt4ZCmoY Curious if anyone else has run old ATI hardware recently.

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[-] vikingtons@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago

hah nice!

mine lives on my desk due to BGA failures ๐Ÿ˜“

[-] RiskRig91@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

Oh wow, that's actually a cool piece to keep! The ATI logo on the die looks amazing up close.

[-] vikingtons@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

haha it's pretty cute. some people make keychains from die packages like this.

When I saw the display corruption in your video, I was worried that your board met the same fate. In my case, I was able to oven bake the board (with as much removed from the PCB as possible) to temporarily resolder the faulty BGA connections and get my data off the system. I'm kind of amazed that a deep clean and repaste resolved that on your end, but glad to see it.

[-] RiskRig91@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

Haha a keychain from the die would actually be awesome! And yeah, when that display corruption showed up I genuinely thought it was dead โ€” was shocked that a clean and repaste fixed it. The oven bake trick is impressive, glad you got your data back!

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 day ago

Cool. I had a 3850 back in the day. Those fans were banshees.

[-] RiskRig91@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Funny you mention that โ€” the 3850 is actually my next video!

[-] insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafe 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I've got a 5770 and for team green a GTS 450. I don't feel like testing them, too bad it's unlikely I could just transfer them without shipping (SW Michigan).

I don't really care about money, but I could use something AMD-Polaris-or-better because my 1050Ti is now on legacy drivers and I haven't updated because of that.

[-] RiskRig91@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago

That 5770 is actually on my list to test! Stay tuned โ€” it's coming in a future video

this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
28 points (96.7% liked)

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