I was watching youtube the other day and saw an episode of Digital Gold. It is a podcast of 2 miners and what they do on a regular basis. In Episode "Ethereum Mine 4.0 Stage 10 (Live)" they bake an old MSI 7970 back to life. Myself a miner from 2013 I have a few cards that no longer work so I decided to give it a try. I located an old Gigabyte Windforce R9 280x that suddenly stopped working a while back.
I then took it apart and cleaned off all the thermal paste and removed everything possible.
I put is on a pan with wax paper on the bottom and aluminum foil in 4 corners. I preheated the oven to 375 F and placed it in the middle.
I left it in for 10 min. After I left it out for 30 min to cool down.
I then reassembled the video card and used new thermal grease. I placed it in one of my pcs. Fans started up and I heard the post beep.
To my surprise it booted into windows.....
I have left it mining on Nanopool for 2 days now with no tuning done on it. It has been hashing at 13 MH/s using Claymore 9.5. I am just so surprised this worked. I have 2 more cards (7950) I will attempt to revive. Thank you guys at Digital Gold for putting out the video.
Ok after several of mining......
I am just happy it is still kicking.... damn zombie card now over 25 MH/s