Holy crap, it worked! Dead video card resurrected!

i'm going to try reflowing a w810i cell board that died on me, I'll post the results back here. . .

Originally Posted by accidentalsuccess

I'm very impressed with the 360 results. I'll keep this in mind if mine rrod's on me

ive had my 1st gen 360 for over a year now, got it used and defunct. did a laser tweak mod, and added a 120mm fan to the top. only time it ever RROD was when the PS died. i hope i dont have to try this on mine though haha

oh the horror. i also just got rid of an EVGA 680i board that im pretty sure this could have fixed! grrrr

Originally Posted by Smiththers2

ive had my 1st gen 360 for over a year now, got it used and defunct. did a laser tweak mod, and added a 120mm fan to the top. only time it ever RROD was when the PS died. i hope i dont have to try this on mine though haha

What's the laser tweak mod?

Originally Posted by g0dM@n

What's the laser tweak mod?

some of the drives that came with the 360 needed adjustments to stay reading game discs once the drive got older.

I've got a X700 pro that will get this treatment and see what happens.

I've overheated my 360 twice to bring it back from the dead, but has failed again within days of doing it. Think I'll try the oven trick and report back.

LOL this is the best thing I have seen in awhile

Originally Posted by RaZoRbLaDeD

LOL this is the best thing I have seen in awhile

absolutely. i almost got a b**er when I first read it.

aw sweet.

So what's the official recipe? If I have a 4850 which gives me green screen with lines and VPU recover screens (so clinicaly dead card), what should I do with it? I understand that I have to remove the cooling to bring this PCB naked, but then what?

isn't your 4850 still under warranty?

Originally Posted by Omegas

isn't your 4850 still under warranty?

I bought it from an anonymous reseller last fall. I have absolutely no idea how to deal with Sapphire! I left an e-mail for support and they never replied.

Originally Posted by jmorel33

I bought it from an anonymous reseller last fall. I have absolutely no idea how to deal with Sapphire! I left an e-mail for support and they never replied.

just an email? call them mofos!

Just wanted to post what I tried after reading this. My wife bought an HP laptop a year and a half ago or so. Literally three days after the warranty expired, it started displaying massive video artifacts and messiness, along with hard locks, rendering it completely unusable. Since it did it on the video out too, I knew it wasn't just the LCD and was something with the board.

When I read this thread, I had an idea. I tore it down to the bare mobo, pulled the memory, processor, and plastic bits off, and baked the motherboard on a cookie sheet at about 400 for 15 minutes. Let it cool off, hooked it back up... and I have a working laptop again! Completely shocked that it actually worked. Amazing what a solder reflow can do. If it can work on video cards and mother boards, I've been thinking back to other things I've had that got flaky. Might try it again.

Originally Posted by jmorel33

I bought it from an anonymous reseller last fall. I have absolutely no idea how to deal with Sapphire! I left an e-mail for support and they never replied.

I've dealt with them as second-hand. I had to use an original invoice, so I had to get the invoice from the person I bought it from.

Originally Posted by Scoth

Just wanted to post what I tried after reading this. My wife bought an HP laptop a year and a half ago or so. Literally three days after the warranty expired, it started displaying massive video artifacts and messiness, along with hard locks, rendering it completely unusable. Since it did it on the video out too, I knew it wasn't just the LCD and was something with the board.

When I read this thread, I had an idea. I tore it down to the bare mobo, pulled the memory, processor, and plastic bits off, and baked the motherboard on a cookie sheet at about 400 for 15 minutes. Let it cool off, hooked it back up... and I have a working laptop again! Completely shocked that it actually worked. Amazing what a solder reflow can do. If it can work on video cards and mother boards, I've been thinking back to other things I've had that got flaky. Might try it again.

Unbelievable... makes me wish I didn't sell off all of the "dead" parts I had.

Oh wait... I have a motherboard that turns on, but won't POST... AHA!!! I'll have to try it on that!!

now where the hell did I put that 6800le that started artifacting..

my friend just did the same thing to get his everex xt5000t laptop working again

This is a fantastic thread.

Seems that the OP may found a fix for the gigantic solder-problems of Nvidia. Damn pity I threw out my HP pavillon notebook with a broken 7800GT chip. That this works on regular cards to such extent makes one think that the solder-bumps been the weak link on grafic cards for quite a while and not only on the Nvidia notebook chips.

I'm happy to say I can confirm what the OP wrote!

I had a similar problem with my vid card (no funky lines, but it just plain stopped booting one day.. looked kinda like the way gas looks in water). I had two of these cards in SLI, and have been using only 1 for about 4 months now.

I followed the OP's directions as close as possible. I had the oven at 390 instead of 385 because I just couldn't get the damn thing to do what I wanted lol. Also, I thought i'd be clever and I removed all the thermal compound from the gpu and ram, and replaced it with Arctic Silver 5 (it's all I had here at home).

Baked it for 10 minutes at 390, cooled it for 30 minutes at room temp (I was impatient lol). I reassembled the card and plugged it in and booted and voila! I'm using it right now! I really didn't expect this to work, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to try (certainly couldn't hurt anything). I'm so glad I happened upon this thread!

Thanks to the guy that posted this thread on the main page (Kyle?)! And BIG GIANT THANKS TO THE OP FOR DOING THIS AND THEN POSTING ABOUT IT! GOOD FRIGGIN JOB!