Holy crap, it worked! Dead video card resurrected!

Originally Posted by Mr. B

I want to chime in and report another success story. After conducting a little more 'research,' I tried this technique on my laptop motherboard. I suspended it above a cookie sheet with little balls of foil seen in previous pictures and baked it at 425 for five minutes. After letting it cool and reassembling the Thinkpad I now have a working laptop. I'm still astonished that this actually worked.

Many thanks to all the posters in this thread.

very nice! i guess it didnt melt any important plastic bits then? is that the reason u went with a higher temperature and shorter time?

Actually I just guessed that a laptop would have slightly more resilient solder in it... thinking back though, it was probably just as well it wasn't in the oven for 10 minutes. The board does indeed have quite a few plastic connectors on it including a CPU socket.

I now want to throw my whole E1705 in the oven.

Well the CPU socket had to withstand the soldering process to begin with right?

Originally Posted by Haste266

in the oven

OP, If I'm ever over for dinner, don't cook with that cookie sheet. I'm not scared of chemical vapors from the card. It's the fact that cookie sheet looks like it has feces smeared on it that bothers me. lol

edit: condensed quote to relevant pic at OP's polite request ;-)

wtf man. why did u have to quote my post?

i hate scrolling through pictures i have already seen in a thread. especially when i am the one that took them!


edit: thanks! =D

This is awesome! Grats to all those whose cards have been fixed by this method. And I thought I was lucky/adventurous for fixing a clicking hard drive (knocked it over when it was off and then would just click 3 times and repeat 2 more times then spin down) by hitting it on its side with a hammer just as the first click was about to happen.

Drive was sitting broken for over a year so I figured I had nothing to lose. It's now running Vista Ultimate without a hitch and passed SMART and WD's extended diagnostics multiple times.

It really is true, hammers, or in this case heat, really do fix everything, lmfao.

I may have to give this a try on a messed up 7900gt I've got.

All the success stories really beg the question of how many hardware failures are due to failed/damaged solder points.

I place partial blame on lead free solder paste for the increase in problems. Ever try to work with it compared to regular solder? Its hard, easily causes cold joints and its a major pain to do any kind of repair rework on electronics where rohs free paste was used.

This thread is win, must try this on artifacting 7900gs.

Makes you wonder how many dead computer parts on ebay are about to be snagged up quick!

Originally Posted by enlightenedby42

I may have to give this a try on a messed up 7900gt I've got.

All the success stories really beg the question of how many hardware failures are due to failed/damaged solder points.

I don't know, but since companies have gone to Pb free solder it has gotten worse.

dugg http://digg.com/d1sTyY

The next time my card dies on me, I will have to attempt this hotfix(no pun intended) if I can't RMA it first or if the warranty is out of date. I'm glad to see that your card is successfully working again.

This isn't baking.

It's called reflowing and it's a common procedure. I have even reflowed a Blackberry that failed from being slept on.

So I tried this with a laptop, and all was going well till I put it all together and it wouldn't boot at all, then I noticed a single capacitor had fallen off. Do you guys think it's worth the trouble trying to solder the single capacitor back on? Think that'll actually fix it? It's an old lappie that died a while ago, just wanted to do this for fun really, any thoughts?

Digg front page, better snatch up any dead video cards from ebay and elsewhere now!

This is awesome. I think I'll have to try this with a dead shuttle mobo I've got kicking around.

Will the caps explode if you dont remove them?

Not if you're doing it carefully and not overheating it...