Now this old beast is a radio on HD 69 50.

Lately I've been obsessed with finding older 40 graphics cards that sound quite repairable and trying to do exactly that.

This to get cold from 2010 has an apparent problem with fan noise.

I'm told it works just fine, but it's very, very audible during intense situation, something that could be very off putting if you're playing a game or watching a video.

This card cost around 299 U.

S.

Dollars at launch or £270 for this specific M S I reference model here in the UK But today I paid just £15 for it on eBay.

After hopefully resolving any issues will then be seeing what it can do as far as modern gaming performance is concerned.

But first it's time to see if it works.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, then it's always a good idea to test your hardware before opening it up and cleaning it.

If you don't and it doesn't work after putting it back together, you'll never know if it arrived broken or you broke it to test this.

Today I'll be adding it to my rising 5 1600 tests set up with eight gigs of 3000 megahertz DDR four, which will let the card reached its maximum potential when it comes to gaming performance.

So it turns out the car does indeed work, but it sounds like this, and that's even before we got into a game.

It's so loud that after running it last night for a couple of hours, I went to my car this morning and my neighbors asked me why I was quote vacuuming at 11 p.m. C.

I live in a semi detached house like this crudely drawn example here, so any loud noises can be quite easily heard through the walls.

One noise complaint later, and it was timeto work out.

What the issue waas.

So let's take it apart and talk more about it now.

This came in based GPU, along with its big brother.

The 69 70 faced a few delays before launch, which is never a promising sign.

Not to mention they had some fierce and ultimately superior competition.

Invidious GTX 500.

Siri's offerings these days.

I'm not sure how things stand because of drivers, et cetera, but back then it was a pretty competitive market at this price point.

An interesting must mention point about the 69 50 is that it can also be unlocked to match that of HD 69 70 level performance.

This is done by flashing the bios off the 69 70 onto the 69 50 using a free program like 80 I flash in turn, unlocking extra shade er's.

I think this was made impossible with newer 69 fifties, so we'll look into that a little later on.

But because this is a reference model with the jewel by or switch, it should be capable here.

First, though, let's finish cleaning this thing up after reassembling it and putting it back in the system.

The noise persisted.

Interestingly, getting to this point in the driver installation resolved the issue.

Now you may think that this was an obvious fix installed.

The drivers in it sort of regulates the fan control, but installing the driver's first time round before cleaning up didn't make any difference to the racket that this thing made, so I guess it just needed a good clean after all.

And that, in combination with the installation of the drivers, made sure that this thing was running.

Okay, It's amazing what some people will get rid off before assessing all of their options.

So before we attempt the unlocking of this card, let's see how it performs with a few very modern gains.

Here are the specs of this M s I reference model.

Now I've run the card at the stock settings.

First of all, before we attempt any F or mention unlocking to get an idea of performance, I started off with Apex legends here, a very popular Battle Royale type title.

As you can see, it did run find at 10.

80 p, although we did have to turn things down to the low settings, the frame rate, then different between sort of 30 and 60 f PS, depending on the area of the map.

And of course, this will change too, depending on what's going on on screen.

I don't really consider this to be a particularly demanding game, but it might give some older hardware a run for its money in some more intense situations.

Now, when it came to a far cry five.

We had to turn the resolution down to 900 p in order to exceed 30 frames per second, a target that I've attempted to achieve throughout all of today's tests.

Because 60 is a little bit unrealistic for this card.

No, at 900 p, we were seeing between 30 and 40 frames per second on average with the stock settings.

And I think in terms of performance, this is sort of playable on this old GPU.

Everything was set to low, and any form of anti A leasing was indeed turned off.

Now, just like Apex legends, the onscreen action may change the frame rate.

But I suppose you could say that for every game out there far cry fivers again.

It's particularly action packed, though, so just bear in mind that you may see a few drops below 30 f ps.

In some instances now, when it came to just cause, for it was a pretty sad story.

Here for 80 p was the selected resolution because at 7 20 p or 10 80 p, we were seeing even less frames.

But even at 4 80 p here, the frame rate was by no means playable.

No driver support, I believe, ended for this card.

A while ago, I couldn't find any later drivers than ones that were released back in 2000 and 16.

So you're gonna have a hard time with some games they will give you.

Warnings are all your graphics card is below the minimum requirements that battlefield five, which, by the way, we'll start but decided to freeze for me at the main menu.

So just bear that in mind, too.

But you may be surprised to know that Metro Exodus, the latest in the series and probably the newest game on today's list, ran at 10.

80 p with it least 30 frames per second orbit with the low settings.

Now, this surprised me, but I wasn't too surprised.

Trail, we say, because I have read that the minimum system requirements consist of a night 5 44 40 on dhe a G t x 6 70 which struck me as quite odd because I didn't think that the 6 70 would be able to run a game like this.

Now that I see the 69 50 can I hold better hopes for those aforementioned minimum requirements, so that would probably be something will have to test out in the future, just to see how accurate they are with 69 50 though well, it was a pretty decent performance here.

There were some massive frame drops in areas, but in terms of an overall average frame rate, yes, it will be above 30 f p s.

But it's those frame drops and stutters that may put you off entirely because they are quite frequent.

Let's just say the game ran a lot better than I was expecting with this nearly nine year old card next up.

No, I wanted to see if we could unlock this car to run at 69 70 speeds.

There's a great guide on tech power up that's very simple to follow.

It just involves downloading a simple program called a M D flash, saving the current BIOS on your card in case anything goes wrong, downloading a 69 70 biles, loading that from the program's menu and then clicking program.

What this will do is it will take about 10 seconds to flash your card, and all you have to do after that is restart the system.

When you turn everything back on, you can head on over to, GPU said, for example, and it will tell you that you now have 15 36 shade er's, as opposed to the original camp clock Speeds and memory clocks will also be increased now.

This added a few degrees to our stock temperature, but it seems as though things were pretty stable, and I decided to jump back into Metro Exodus, first of all, to see if the card was indeed stable and whether or not we saw an improvement over our original frame rate.

Now I'm happy to report that there was a slight increase in average performance.

But the best thing about unlocking this card was the fact that it reduced a lot of the stuttering that we were seeing before.

Before, we're not the card we were seeing drops to perhaps 12 or 13 frames per second in some instances during this opening level, so I can't speak for the rest of the game.

But after unlocking it well, most of those frame drops were indeed God.

Now, unfortunately, we didn't see much of an improvement in just goes for the average frame.

It did increase.

But I think it's more of a drive of support issue here.

And perhaps the game is having a bit of a problem with the two gigs of V.

Ramez.

Well, we actually saw a more stable frame rate, and far cry.

Five is where we kept the 900 p resolution with the low settings and anti racing off.

But our average frame rate was at least 40 here, as opposed to the mid thirties, which was a minor but pretty welcomed change in performance.

I have to say, because when things heat up a bit more, then you aren't going to see as many framed drops Now I decided to try Shadow of the Tomb Raider as well, and this is all I got.

I'm not joking.

The game loaded on da This is all I saw.

The opening cut scenes didn't work.

The screen was just black on Dhe.

This was as far as we got in terms of gameplay after this.

It's interesting because the system actually crashed to a blue screen, and so I had to restart.

It was after that that I decided to return to 69 50 to its original bios because obviously it wasn't all that stable, not just because of what was happening in shadow of the Tomb Raider, but because everything started to seem a little bit Laghi, for example, the Windows Explorer.

I just decided to not respond, either, and there were a few different things going on on screen with lagging just things that didn't seem quite right.

I don't think this was entirely stable, but that's why they put the bio switch on these old cars in case you do mess things up, flashing it back with simple just load up.

The old bios flashed it, restarted the system, and everything was back to normal to make sure it was still a stable.

I decided to fire up, and I will gain bio shock, infinite and with the higher settings.

I played it for a couple of hours just fine, with no problems.

All in all, I'm glad we managed to fix the fan issue, and I'm glad it was such a simple process in terms of how one of these performance in 2019 0 well, not very well.

You're gonna run into issues with driver support on dhe performance in general, but There will be a few surprises amongst the results, like Metro Exodus, for example.

Anyway, with all that said, I hope you've enjoyed this video.

I really do enjoy fixing up these old cars, and I hope you've enjoyed watching it.

If you did leave a like on it.

If you didn't leave a dislike, subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already, and hopefully I'll see all of you in the next one.