Poly-Modding: Does it actually work?

Inno3D GeForce 7300GT

The Original Capacitors

This was a spare graphics card I had lying around which I have already re-capped with Rubycon MCZ. Now, I’m going to re-re-cap it with polymer capacitors. Originally, It had Sacon FZ series capacitors, which look a lot like solid capacitors, since they have no plastic sleeve, but the K-shaped vent, as well as the “FZ__” markings on the top (and the fact that at least some of them have usually exploded by the time they are 6 months old) give them away. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of it with the original Sacons. Another problem this card had when I originally got it is that the fan had failed. That has already been replaced by a dual ball bearing model from JMC Datech.

 The replacement capacitors

As you can see, this card only has four 1500µF 6.3V electrolytic capacitors. Since the capacitors on a graphics card are generally in the GPU VRM, the reduced capacitance rule applies, the same as it does in the CPU VRM. Therefore, I will be using 820µF polymer capacitors as replacements. Measuring the voltage with my DMM shows that all four of the capacitors are on the VRM out side, with only 1.2V. This means that 2.5V capacitors can be used, which is good, because I only have one 6.3V 820µF polymer capacitor on hand. I used the same Chemi-con PSA 820µF 2.5V capacitors that I used on the IBM Netvista’s motherboard. Since there is only one value used here, I decided that it wasn’t necessary to make a table.

 The Stress-testing

For testing graphics cards, I will be using Two utilities. Firstly, I will be using Freestone Group’s Video Card Stability Test software, which is a freeware utility that displays two pictures of a spinning globe, one on colour and the other in Black and white, using the GPU to render them. The second utility I will use is Ozone3D’s Furmark. Like the previous utility, it uses the GPU to render a 3D image, although this utility displays a furry donut. Each utility will be run for 24 hours, like the CPU stress-tests used on motherboards.

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