Holy crap, it worked! Dead video card resurrected!

Wow, very lucky.

In addition to the gradual heatup that others have mentioned in a reflow oven:

There are also some electronic components that are moisture sensitive, in that they soak up the moisture in the air. If you high temprature bake them while this moisture is present, it turns to steam inside the compoents and ruins them.

The solution is to do a long low temprature bake (around 50 deg C) for a period of 24 hours, before doing the final high temp bake to reflow the solder.

Just an FYI for you people with dead vid cards or xbox's that are also thinking of trying to resurect them via this method.

I just put my GTX 260 in the oven @ 500 for 20 minutes to make it a GTX280... Now it doesnt work at all! What did I do wrong and how do I turn my broken GTX280 back into the GTX260. Thanks.

I'd wrap the entire thing in aluminum foil... then put it in for 450*F....

Good work dude.

interesting. I do have some old video cards with artifacting issues, but don't really care enough to try. They are also pretty damn old, an X800XT PE AGP, and an X1900GT.

I do have a 74GB raptor that stopped working a long time ago. Won't even act like its trying to spin up, so it's a problem with the PCB. At one point I was thinking of getting a replacement PCB for it, but that seemed to be fairly expensive. I wonder if I could try and reflow the PCB.

It could also just be fried. I noticed some voltage problems with my PSU after this happened. When I looked inside there were leaking caps. gg enermax. Noticed this problem like a month or two out of warranty. Replaced the PSU of course

Originally Posted by __hollywood|meow

your story is hilarious and awesome. congratulations, seems like some solder did indeed get separated from a critical joint.. what a crazy fix~!

^^^

oooh man! I just threw out 2 videocards which were artifacting. A 6800GT AGP and 6800Ultra AGP. Granted they were both old cards, but they would have been perfect for a basic linux build! ahhhhh!!!!

Originally Posted by Devnull

interesting. I do have some old video cards with artifacting issues, but don't really care enough to try. They are also pretty damn old, an X800XT PE AGP, and an X1900GT.

I do have a 74GB raptor that stopped working a long time ago. Won't even act like its trying to spin up, so it's a problem with the PCB. At one point I was thinking of getting a replacement PCB for it, but that seemed to be fairly expensive. I wonder if I could try and reflow the PCB.

It could also just be fried. I noticed some voltage problems with my PSU after this happened. When I looked inside there were leaking caps. gg enermax. Noticed this problem like a month or two out of warranty. Replaced the PSU of course

Might want to try the 800XT PE. As it is one of the kings of AGP, it might fetch you some $$$ if working. Not sure about HDD's. Anyone have any luck cooking their HDD back to life? I imagine 99.99% of HDD failure is mechanical, but what do I know. If any success stories, please tell!

Umm, I don't think magnetic platters would take kindly to being cooked... I doubt 99.9% of failures are strictly mechanical, a lot of hard drives do fail because the chips on the daughterboard die... But if you suspect that's the case, there's always ways to replace those (though it's more trouble than it's worth unless you need to retrieve important data).

I wouldn't try the entire drive, I was talking about the PCB, which comes off of the casing.

I also think that my X800XT PE AGP just needs a new cooler most likely. Would test it w/ a new cooler if I still was using an agp mobo.

Yeah, I was replying to the user above which suggested 'cooking the HDD' (which sounds like putting the whole thing in)... Obviously an attempt could be made to revive the PCB on the underside by itself. Hmm, I might actually try this in fact, with an external hard drive I have which died a sudden and un-announced death... I yanked it out and the HDD itself is fine and has been working great inside my case for over two years, the controllers on the enclosure itself had died.

I hope this thread doesn't lead to everyone cooking their PC parts lol!

after reading this thread I decided that I'm going to cook everything that breaks and see what happens

I revived a broken 8600 GTS card using this method on a newer analog dial oven, 9 minutes 30 seconds at 385. Huge thanks to everyone, truly [H]ard. I am going to now try this on a broken DV6000 AMD laptop mobo that doesn't post.

I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! IT REVIVED MY DV6000 LAPTOP AS WELL!

Note: the smell was strong but no smoke. I feel like I inhaled something. I am running a fan through the kitchen and all the windows are open. Please, ventilate if you're going to do this.

As others have said, remember that electronics are made of nasty shit and heating them can release some dangerous substances. I'd never try it in my home oven; it would probably kill my parrot and could make people sick.

You're not supposed to be melting anything and/or releasing anything from the part... If you are, you're definitely doing it wrong. (and there's probably even nastier shit in half the stuff you've cooked in there, heh)

Posting for awesomeness. Bought a new card (should be arriving tomorrow actually) because my trooper of a 9800 pro finally went into its artifacting death throes after so many years. But with this, I may be able to re-enlist him yet again. Muh hahaha. This time, however, I may give him an easy desk job serving network files.

wow oven...

My Grandpa had a pacemaker. Whats the word?

i might try this on an old gf2 gts and see if it fixes the little bit of corrution it has.