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How a dead GFX Card is made alive professionally

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How a dead GFX Card is made alive professionally.

In this article I will show you how a dead graphics card is repaired. No oven baking, no do-it-yourself type trikes, just a pure professional repairs.
Meet the victim, my old no display, dead ATI-Radeon X1650 graphics card.



Removing the heat sink.




Thermal compound on the chip cleaned.


Now circuit board is installed on a BGA chip reflow machine.


Heater head mounted properly.


Machine in action


Within a minute chip is out.


There is very little space between chip and circuit board approx. 0.1mm still you can see their is dust under the chip. This dust, heat and moisture together sometimes oxides and breaks these fine connection resulting a GPU failure.


Chip is mounted on a reballing mount.


You can see many connection pins have gone black due to dust and oxide layer.


Heat cleaning the chip connection terminal.





Preparing the chip for new BGA soldering balls. Flux, 0.6mm lead free soldering BGA balls and grid.


Some close look on BGA soldering balls





Grid aliened, chip ready for reballing.



Ball properly falls into place.


All missed holes are carefully populated with a ball using a fine needle.


Perfect. New shiny ball are in place. Looks nice



Little heat for removal of any excise flux applied during the ball placement stage.


Now chip is carefully placed back on the circuit and controlled heat is applied for re-soldering.


Perfect chip re-soldering



New thermal compound is applied and heat sink installed.



Test system ready. Now is the time that will show whether the GPU is back to life or gone forever.


It’s live.. Success.



Some GTA san andreas run shows that GPU is 100% fine.

Hope you like this article.

Regards
Rakesh Sharma

Source / More Info
 
Last edited:

de.das.dude

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Did you buy these equipment?
 
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Very interesting, but is it not cheaper to toss it in the garbage and buy a new one? Outside of the top of the line cards I figure this to be the case due to material + labor hours
 

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Amazing stuff!
 
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Very interesting, but is it not cheaper to toss it in the garbage and buy a new one? Outside of the top of the line cards I figure this to be the case due to material + labor hours
No not agreed. Many cards are repaired like this when RMAed. Giving a new card is way too expensive.
 
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Pretty neat.
 
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Great work man, hope we will see more in the future.
 
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Very interesting!

This is why the best way is to buy another card when yours fail. Unless you have all that apparatus and knowledge in your home. :)
 
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I like this but wouldn't this process be more expensive than the card itself? Or is it depending on the card?
 
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Awesome, thanks for sharing!!
 

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Can you repair AMD CPUs that have missing pins with this way of repairing?
 
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Benchmark Scores Faster than yours... I'd bet on it. :)
Cool! This is awesome, just not for the end user, but interesting to see none the less!

If you want to do this at home bake the card guys. ;)
 
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Cool stuff. I was always interested to how these sort of things were done for hardware.
 

peche

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Benchmark Scores well I've fried a 775' P4 12 years ago, that counts?
Thanks for sharing, awesome post and process....
Regards,
 
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Fascinating process. Thanks for sharing with us.
 
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Thank you very much for viewing my article and very happy that you all enjoyed it the same as I love doing it.. Will sharing more like this.
 
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Thank for sharing the info.
 

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I enjoyed reading this :)
 
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Really nice work, so it's not the gpu it self that dies, it's simply the connection, not bad nice to see some "old" hardware coming back to life ^^
 
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