Gigabyte Windforce 3x OC 4gb GTX 680 resurrect

tcph02

Honorable
Aug 14, 2013
22
0
10,510
I bought a used gtx 680 dirt cheap but it has some artifacts and smells like burned electric stuff.
1. The artifacts are red dots , triangles and other
2. The artifacts are displayed only with drivers and in windows. (The boot logo and windows logo are fine. Even the windows is fine in safe mode.)
3. When I start a game ( Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor) the artifacs are really bad . And the card resets. (driver crash, etc) -> Thermal problem (more to come)
4. I've notice that one of the vram chips(first one looks to me, it has 8) it's hot, and you can't touch it when in game because it's becoming really hot(I mean really hot) .
The other 2 are worm but not like the first one.
The chips are HYNIX H5GQ2H24AFR R0C 248A . I've found a seller but the chips are HYNIX H5GQ2H24AFR R0C 214A , does it matter?
I will post a few photos to see better the issue. Please help me! Thanks!
PS: I would like to have replies from people with knowledge in this domain.
 

tcph02

Honorable
Aug 14, 2013
22
0
10,510
https://www.dropbox.com/home/Camera%20Uploads?preview=2015-05-28+15.00.05.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/home/Camera%20Uploads?preview=2015-05-28+15.02.24.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/home/Camera%20Uploads?preview=2015-05-28+15.04.20.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/home/Camera%20Uploads?preview=2015-05-28+15.04.01.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/home/Camera%20Uploads?preview=2015-05-28+15.00.23.jpg

As you can see when the windows uses windows 7 basic theme the artifacts on the startbar disappear. (strange...when uses normal theme the startbar has red dots (artifacts) and other type of artifacts.
 

tcph02

Honorable
Aug 14, 2013
22
0
10,510
I can't get a refund. So I need and want to fix it. I've found that the ICs are x16 (8 on the front, 8 on the back). They are HYNIX H5GQ2H24AFR R0C with a speed of 6GB/s. They are runing in x16 mode , 1.5V . I would buy a few 4 or 6 to change the first 2 or 3 modules of ICs. But I have two questions:
1. Does that number 248A, 214A, 307V, etc. matter? Or is just a production date? ( I couldn't find anything on the internet)
2. Could someone tell how many and what chips to change? They are quite expensive (7-20$ a piece and they are 16 of them, so total replacement isn't an option for me) . I mean how could I find the bad vram chips?
UPDATE: The card runs fine without drivers (not a sinle artifact) but the vram memory is 2990mb in GPU-Z and the Core Clock at 0Mhz and a few other things Unknown(I think the lack of drivers may do that) but I really don't know what to say about the vram amount, when I intall the lastest drivers the vram is 4096mb (all of it) but I get the artifacts.
And the burn smell seems to be coming from the thermal paste, I will replace that. ( the temps on the gpu are ok max 35C) .