Broken Quadro 1500 into Working Quadro 3500

Small confession: the last time I had a desktop with a "real" graphics card in it was April of '09.

A friend of mine was nice enough to give me his dead nVidia Quadro 1500, and I decided to try something new: reflow it with a wallpaper heat-gun similar to this thread.

After removing the heat sink, cleaning up the chip, and giving it an aluminum foil bib I was ready to reflow.

Instagram makes everything look awesome.

After putting everything back together time to see how my performance improved:

On-board Graphics Score - 4.6

Quadro 1500 Score - 5.1

Well that's not much of an upgrade at all, but there's more. This particular card shares the same guts as the GeForce 7900 GT and Quadro FX 3500, so you can allegedly flash it with either bios and get a performance boost (read on). Just for kicks I ran a few benchmarks on the original 1500 bios to see how it fared:

The stock 1500 bios scored a 5889 in 3DMark05.

Next up was finding the new bios and following the instructions to install it. 

I tried two versions of the 7900 GS bios (rev0 and rev1) and had no success. I ended up bricking the card and having to dig out an old PC, set it to boot to a PCI graphics card while still having the Quadro inside, then flashing the old 1500 bios to get the card working again. 

This isn't getting complicated at all.

Never one to be defeated I tried the other Quadro bios. Fortunately the 3500 bios took (it can be found here) , so I was able to boot to that. Unfortunately after restarting I was greeted with a warning about not having enough power for the GPU:

Error: Nothing is ever easy.

The problem is the card doesn't have the connector for the 'supplemental power connector', so there's no way of providing enough power to the GPU. This causes the cards core and memory clocks to be crippled and results in the some bizarre benchmark results: the windows test got worse while 3DMark05 got better.

I should have quit while I was ahead.

Increased core and mem clock. 6128 in 3DMark05 

Even though it scored lower in the windows test I see definite improvement in video editing, so I'm sticking with this firmware for now. What does Windows know anyway?

So the next step is repopulating the plug for the power connector, random missing capacitors and an inductor. Unfortunately schools got me busy, so that will have to wait for now.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[Update 04/16/2013]

After buying some parts and repopulating the board I managed to blow out a trace. I might pick back up on this project if I have time but as for now it is dead :(