5770 flambé

It… shouldn’t look like this.ⁱ Released in mid-2010, the ATI Radeon HD 5770 Mac Edition is the highest performing graphics card that works on my tragically old Mac Pros and their “obsolete” OSen. It replaced the original X1900 XT early last year because it was overly bruyant and not compensatorily puissant.ⁱⁱ From the time I purchased it in February 2016,ⁱⁱⁱ the 5770 was more than capable and in fact a very reasonably priced upgrade for a machine that I use to frequently… until this past week when first my screens froze and then the box refused to reboot to anything other than a black screen. Having never experienced such a spectacle first-hand, I first blamed the spinning rust I was still shamefully sporting, but after overduely upgrading to an SSD, the graphics card arose like Lazarus to trick me one more time before croaking for good. Reinstalling the old 1900 confirmed the diagnosis. Dead GPU! Cracking open the 5770 case revealed the flambé’d culprit within. The top of the copper-coloured radiator had this melted half-sandwich.

More 5770s are on order. Hopefully the next batch won’t have been Quake’d to death first.

The troubles of maintaining old hardware, I tell ya!

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1. The Juniper XT GPU should look like this.

   Can you believe that AMD squeezed a billion 40nm transistors into this petite package ? ↩

2. I’ll tolerate some noise from my machines but the performance had better blow my socks off, throw me back in my chair, and strain my neck muscles in return, as you’ll soon see with Pete’s newest addition to the garage. More on which soon! ↩
3. Doing the math on my usage of the 5770 reveals just how harshly it must’ve been used in its former life. I currently use this machine 2-3 hours per day on average, so maybe 20 hours a week and 80 per month, but this box was in storage from May 2016 to September 2016! That means that I used it for ~maybe~ 1`000 hours, running little more than a pair of 1920×1200 and 2560×1600 monitors crunching mostly text, web, and a smattering of HTML5. And I live in the arctic so it’s not like the ambient temperature should be an issue. Da fuck, right ? ↩