Question Broken piece on AMD Radeon HD 5500

[Spare Brains]

I just gotta new computer and a while back someone had givin me an AMD Radeon HD 5500 gpu and the other day I said I was gonna put it in once I get a new monitor(I had a crt and could not connect it to the gpu) and I noticed that one of those little black squares on it were just barely hanging on, I took it the rest of the way off and when I gotta new monitor I put it in and it works great, but I've noticed a few graphicl glitches especially when I overclock it...if I add more than 50 -100 mhz it becomes unstable, after about 2 days the graphical glichis are not there on a slight overclock of 50 mhz. If I overclock it too much more the artifacts and glitches show up and usually games sometimes crash on startup and if it makes it to the game it will crash after a little bit of playing it. Oh and with the graphics card in...only in the menu of games, ( I use earbuds ) it plays this buzzing sound..only in the menues of games tho. My dad thinks I should try and saulder the box back on....

 

[Spare Brains]

I'm also gonna assume that the little black square has something to do with the dvi port sooo maybe thats why the card isn't rendered useless as I am using the card right now on my pc that I am sending this from

 

[Spare Brains]

I would also like to know why it is so unstable when I overclock it

 

[Spare Brains]

After I put the gpu in it gave me a little over than twice as much fps that I was getting without out it (depending on the game obviously)

 

[DSzymborski]

Hard to say without a reference board to look at (I'm pretty sure this is actually an HD 5500). Are there any marks on the piece? It's hard to see as the picture's kinda blurry. You'll be hard-pressed to find documentation of this nature.

If it's technically working, I'd just leave the GPU in. I wouldn't worry about not being able to overclock; the fps gains are likely negligible.

How old is the new PC? If it has integrated graphics, basically any integrated graphics over the last eight years or so ought to be outperforming this GPU.

In any case, it's probably not worth the effort to solder. You should only solder if you're willing to buy a new GPU and if you're willing to buy a new GPU, you can get used ones that are faster than this in the $20 range on eBay.

 

[Spare Brains]

My CPU is an i3-4160 @ 3.60 ghz and has intel HD 4400 and my dedicated GPU performs much better than my integrated one. About the marks on the GPU I will have to look at it again. It works to my liking, as long as I can get over 20 fps I am great as I just upgraded from a laptop with an amd a8 6410 which got me about 5 - 20 fps in games, my pc is a dell insperon 3647, I get ~25 fps in assassins creed black flag, 50 - 60 fps on borderlands 2. Just showing some benchmarks. Anything more than 30 fps is really nice and 45+ fps is godly to me

 

[Spare Brains]

I figured out that it only glitches if I overclock the memory too much