What to do with $840 Worth of Broken Computer Parts?
 

Ok, so my friend's uncle thought it would be cool to buy about $1500 worth of parts for his nephew last Christmas. I got to help him put the water cooling together :mdr:! At first, it was a Q9650 Quad Core CPU, 4GB DDR3 1600 ram, 800ish watt psu, Rampage Extreme motherboard, and an ATI 4870 video card with 512MB of DDR5. And a giant full tower case with water cooling for the CPU, northbridge, and video card. It was a very impressive setup until the 4870 started displaying artifacts on the screen. So his uncle says, "No problem, I'll just send you one of my 4870X2's and a new power supply for it!" Which is exactly what he did. Unfortunately, this new SilverStone 1200 watt psu will not turn on for the life of me. It will only click, giving power for about 1/2 a second, then turn off. The 4870x2 displays gray lines across the screen, so we figured that my friend's uncle left coolant in the waterblock, which got out during shipping and damaged both the card and the power supply. So his uncle then sent him his OTHER 4870x2 and ANOTHER power supply, and those two seem to be working fine now.

Well, the two expensive video cards and the ridiculously powerful power supply are now in my possession. Unfortunately, the uncle does not believe in receipts, so I don't have much of a way to get warranty work on these amazing pieces of computer hardware. The waterblocks could bring some money, though.

Does anyone have any idea how I can get these hardwares to work or sell them to someone for a decent amount of money?

Thanx,
Brijar!!!

If your wanting to build your own gaming rig, thats a great start. If not, ebay those suckers

By the sounds of it, this uncle has enough money where believing in receipts doesn't matter, though it would be handy right now...

You should find out when the cards were released and see if you can get warranty work based off that.

What I'm saying is, say the card was released May 08, and has a 2 year warranty. So even if you were to get it right when it came out, it would still, logically, have to be under warranty until May 2010. You can try reasoning with the customer support (say you got it as a gift, which you did) to see if you can get them to do a 1 time courtesy replacement.

Im sure there are some electrical monded PC geeks out there who could fix those items, or know some way to get them repaired for alot less than the retail cost = profit to be made. I would sell them on either ebay or a PC gaming forum, stating the problems (sold as seen)- sure you will get a fair bit of moneyfor them.

On a side note, I had issues with artifacts across my screen when I got my new PC, just needed to update the graphics drivers and it worked perfectly afterwords....

I got warranty on a ATI card (before they were AMD) and they based it all off of the date code on the card, no receipt needed.

It varies greatly depending on the vendor. Most 3rd party video card makers "buy" the core chipset and reference build and slap own their own label. In which case, warranty is via the purchase date of the product.

You could always send it to me to trash or whatever :whistle:

Those are some great pieces of hardware...
Wish I could get my hands on them.. :no:

Sounds strange to me that 2 video cards had issues. I'd be looking toward some other issue. Water cooling is a funny thing and definitely something you take your time doing. One of my mates is water cooling his computer at the moment and it is causing us no end of problems.

Thanks for the options, guys. Yeah, I can't even tell who made the cards. Since they are watercooled, I don't have the original fan and shroud, and I would think that the manufacture would've written its name all over the card, but for the life of me, I can only find ATI on them and product numbers that don't return many results. I'll post some good pictures up of them so that maybe someone can spot the real product number or manufacture OR SOMETHING!
The pictures are really big so that you can read the writing on them, so I'm just uploading them to MediaFire.
http://www.mediafire.com/?niw4nmmnqzi

If nobody can tell anything about it, I think I'll just go the selling route. Since I don't have a heatsink and fan for either card and my power supply doesn't have the right connectors, I can't hook them up to see if they'd work in my computer.

I have built computers for everyone in my house and then some, and I've never had any trouble with them! But my friend's water cooled computer is always having trouble with either the RAID (he's fried one 1TB and one 750GB drive) or the DVD drive isn't working, or it won't boot, etc etc. It's very frustrating, especially considering how much the hardware cost.

Thanx,
Brijar!!!