Yeah, used on ebay, former miner card. Actually arrived today. Friggin' huge! I run a side-by-side full ATX cube case. Well I had been anyway. This card is too huge to fit! So the $80 (which I had to make an offer and was was plus shipping btw) is gonna double since I now need a new case... or I'll prolly just use some ugly old full tower I have around here until after the holidays...

Anyway, back on topic, since I pulled everything apart to try and fit the R9, I went ahead and dropped the broken 1050 ti back in and swapped the mobo BIOS chip.

Yep, it's the 0050 version for the Z170-A board. Skittish, I downclocked from where I had been stable at I think 4.2 Ghz to 3.6 Ghz (133 bclk), and I'm writing this now on the system at 3.6 with prime 95 running in the background.

One thing to note is that the system goes through a bunch of weird power-on, power-off cycles when you first drop the 0050 bios chip in and set the bclk up, before the bclk "takes" so to speak. You have to be patient for a bit while it seems like it's in a power cycle loop. In fact, I did get some actual power-on looping, where the system would hang before post, then would reboot over and over. I unplugged power while it was doing this, waited for the board lights to go out, reconnected power, and hit the switch. Booted no problem after that. I haven't shut it down since, so IDK if it will do that every time or not.

There also might be some overclock settings to prevent this. I have seen some like "post base clock frequency" settings (or something) that I might try out. Will keep you posted!

Another thing I was thinking, I could export via USB a known-good 0050 BCLK BIOS settings file for the OP to download. Not sure if it will work for any processor (I have an i5 6400). LMK if that's something y'all would like.

Cheers!

p.s.: as far as repairing my 1050, only problem is that I don't know the value of the capacitor to replace it. They are so small, even with magnification I couldn't see anything that indicated what it was. I asked Gigabyte for the value, and they refused with no explanation.

Wow, they actually told you it was used for mining? At least they were honest for a change, surprising for mining hardware sales on ebay.

Probably clear CMOS before and After chip drop-in may help with the reboots there, but sometimes this is needed to reset ME FW stuff, memory training etc.

So, since you are using the 0050 now, in the end, can you remember if any of the edits I made long ago worked or not? I always thought there was one that worked, and you didn't have to go back to the 0050, but maybe that was another user with the AR board, I can't remember
Just grab a random same size cap from another dead device, I've done that many times on many devices and it always works. But, you have to have something to connect to, so if the pads are gone you will need to find trace on both sides, hopefully it doesn't go from there directly down into the PCB (if so, you'll be out of luck)

I don't remember re: the bios versions. My chips got mixed up except my stock one I bought on ebay and the 0050 one (I put tape handles on just those two to make them easy to pull out when I was swapping). I can go through them and see, maybe try the settings I'm using now on one of your re-works.

Can't do it right away though b/c I'm re-working an old case I had that'll fit this beast of a card I just got.

About the card repair, right on! It's the tiniest surface mount capacitor I've ever seen, not sure which way I would even orient it. Maybe when I get my new card in I'll try it anyway!

Hi! I know this was about two months ago, but do you think you can share ur bios settings anyways? I'm looking to blck oc my i5 6500 using the same motherboard for gaming use but can I see yours as reference please?

@fust whoops I forgot to tag

Hey!

Yeah, sure, I'll drop those USB drive seting files on here. Gimmie a bit to pull from the BIOS, I'm building a recalbox (or what's the other multi-emulator that you can boot from a US drive? blanking atm...) for my niece so we can play mario kart, so my USB flash drives are in use at the moment.

But for the record, I'm using the Z170-A Bios version 0050 on my Z170-AR. Overclocks my i5 6400 from 2.7 to 4.07 on air (cheap chinese 4-heatpipe setup) and 1.35v with perfect stability and no serious tweeks. One could prolly go higher if you wanted to adjust ram timings and such, but I'm fine with what I've got with minimal fuss...

I'll post the settings file soon.

Cheers!