R9 290X Waterdamage Revive Possible? I Made it worse - need guidance to try & fix please!!

[Kostiz]

Hi All

I was given this card as part of a sale of other items and was told it suffered water damage from rain getting inside an open PC case.

The card was in bad shape since it has oxidation on the card so I tried to clean it up as best I could and plugged it into a test bench but no display, fans spin, no output to screen. I fired up DOS ATIFlash and it talked to the GPU but reports the below and when attempting to save or rewrite to the flash

Below is the Hawaii (R9 290X) that is suspect and not working with ID 0







I tried a number of ways to try and flash the PM25LD010C chip but no luck..I also tried connecting pin 1 and pin 8 on the vbios chip but still unable to reflash and also tried Pin 3 (WP# - write protect) connected to pin 8 same result "failed to read ROM"

So stupid me thinking I could buy a blank vbios chip, flash it and remove the suspect flash chip and so you get the idea...I tried but I stuffed it up. I basically over heated the area and lifted the pads and also lost a surface mount capacitor in the process and seemed to have made it worse than before





I did find the A surface mount CAP, but I am not sure if there was more than one since I didn't take any pictured prior



This is the R9 290X GPU which I had rigged up a simple heatsink with cable ties to hold it on the GPU while i tried to work on it


Here is the affected area zoomed out a little, the green is the cable tie that melted while I tried to remove the vbios chip



So long story short, can anyone help me try and revive this or is it beyond repairing? I am in the process of taking a few more pictures of the lifted tracks and will try and bridge them with hookup wire, but my main concern is are there any other caps around the vbios chip that I may have lost since there appears to be an area for a surface mount on each end of the chip



Please only post if you think you can help me repair it and if you can help me figure out what the CAP values could possibly be next to the vbios chip as I would like to try and fix it instead of tossing this into landfill

PEACE
Kosti

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

i admire your persistence.

 

[R-T-B]

i admire your persistence.

Me too. Good luck.

 

[Assimilator]

Lemme get this straight:

* you bought a broken card without knowing exactly what was broken
* you assumed that the problem was the BIOS chip, so you tried to replace that, and in the process broke the card even further
* you zip-tied a tiny heatsink onto the GPU while you attempted to repair it, even though Hawaii is a massive chip that requires active cooling

Even if you manage to correctly replace the surface-mounted components you removed along with the BIOS chip;
even if you correctly manage to replace the BIOS chip;
even if you manage to reflash the BIOS;
there is NO WAY for you to know what else may or may not be wrong with the card, assuming you haven't fried it with your ghetto heatsink.

Seriously, man. There's a line between persistence and insanity, and you crossed it a while ago. This GPU is deceased, it is demised, it is abjectly not pining for the fjords. Let it go.

 

[P4-630]

....

 

[R-T-B]

Lemme get this straight:

* you bought a broken card without knowing exactly what was broken
* you assumed that the problem was the BIOS chip, so you tried to replace that, and in the process broke the card even further
* you zip-tied a tiny heatsink onto the GPU while you attempted to repair it, even though Hawaii is a massive chip that requires active cooling

Even if you manage to correctly replace the surface-mounted components you removed along with the BIOS chip;
even if you correctly manage to replace the BIOS chip;
even if you manage to reflash the BIOS;
there is NO WAY for you to know what else may or may not be wrong with the card, assuming you haven't fried it with your ghetto heatsink.

Seriously, man. There's a line between persistence and insanity, and you crossed it a while ago. This GPU is deceased, it is demised, it is abjectly not pining for the fjords. Let it go.

I was gonna go that route (Actually, I was going to just post "cool story bro" but you get the idea)...

...But I'm just too darn nice, I guess...

OP: seriously, it's dead. You are wasting your time at this point. I doubt someone at AMD could revive that thing.

 

[PLAfiller]

i admire your persistence.

+1 , also this comment made me lough out loud

@Kostiz , sorry man I can't help you. It looks like a lost cause to me.

 

[silentbogo]

It may be possible to fix that GPU, but at very great expense.

Unless you have a great deal of time, a surplus of electronic components to replace the damaged ones, all the tools necessary to perform the fix (rework station, multimeter, pre-heating bench etc.) and some exceptional repair skills - then just forget about it.

Plus you never know, if the oxidation has already started underneath the GPU and VRAM, so I am 100% sure you'll need to reball every chip on the poor thing just to make sure.
What makes it even harder, is finding a proper stencil for that GPU. It took my collegue 2 months to get a proper set of stencils for GDDR5 alone (reusable GPU stencils of good quality are even harder to come by).

Also I see that you have no cooling for it, so add that to the shopping list.

Cheaper to buy a used R9 290X.

 

[eidairaman1]

Dont buy water damaged circuit boards.

They are called pcbs for a reason.

Chuck the card its shot to shit