I picked up a Radeon HD 3870 for $9.90 — 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.
31 May 2026 22:13
hah nice!
mine lives on my desk due to BGA failures 😓
31 May 2026 22:28
Cool. I had a 3850 back in the day. Those fans were banshees.
31 May 2026 22:34
Funny you mention that — the 3850 is actually my next video!
31 May 2026 23:05
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.
1 Jun 2026 02:26
That 5770 is actually on my list to test! Stay tuned — it's coming in a future video
1 Jun 2026 08:51
Oh wow, that's actually a cool piece to keep! The ATI logo on the die looks amazing up close.
1 Jun 2026 10:41
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.
1 Jun 2026 14:19
Haha a keychain from the die would actually be awesome! And yeah, when that display corruption showed up I genuinely thought it was dead — was shocked that a clean and repaste fixed it. The oven bake trick is impressive, glad you got your data back!
1 Jun 2026 15:06