Holy crap, it worked! Dead video card, resurrected!

CONFIRMED - this actually does work. I'd recommend following the outlined instructions with the cookie sheet, tin foil, and 4 balls of tin foil to hold up the PCB. Excellent work guys, you just saved me having to buy a replacment laptop!



The 8400 on my Intel-based DV2500 laptop crapped out on me recently - it was working perfectly then the graphics glitched and I had no video after that. Subsequent reboots were either no video at all (but it still booted - there was HDD activity) or no POST.

After checking and finding out the HP recall wasn't available for this issue any longer, I figured I'd look into the reflow technique as I had nothing to lose. I confirmed the procedure on this thread yesterday and then removed everything I could from the board - the stickers, the adhesive pads, and the "cage" around the I/O ports. When I got home last night I baked the board for 10 minutes at 395F and let it cool with the oven door cracked open for an hour afterwards. I tried the board again today - and it works again. There were no strange smells while it was baking and nothing on the board melted. While it was cooking the solder was visibly liquefied and after cooling the flux is now visibly apparent on the larger gobs of solder - confirming that it melted.

We're certianly going to experment with this procedure with all of the dead PCB's we have in the shop going forward!
 
The two cards that did work failed after about a month.

I put one back in the oven and now it's working again, haven't tried the other (8800 GTS 320 an 9800GT)
 
IT WORKED and thank you very much for this post. I really appreciate it. I spent 600$ on a xfx 8800gtx card about 2.5 years ago. It was out of warranty and when I called xfx they told me basically I was out of luck. Wouldn't give me a discount or anything. So to say the least I will never buy XFX ever again. So I had nothing to lose so I tried it. It has been working for a week now. I hope that it will work until the direct x 11 cards come out. Thanks again!
 
Brianman said:
IT WORKED and thank you very much for this post. I really appreciate it. I spent 600$ on a xfx 8800gtx card about 2.5 years ago. It was out of warranty and when I called xfx they told me basically I was out of luck. Wouldn't give me a discount or anything. So to say the least I will never buy XFX ever again. So I had nothing to lose so I tried it. It has been working for a week now. I hope that it will work until the direct x 11 cards come out. Thanks again!
Click to expand...

I'm guessing that you did not register your card which is why it was out of warranty. That is no reason not to buy XFX again. It is user error...
 
Xfx is great, i had a card die on me and wasnt registered but they still let me rma :) (and it was over 2yrs old)
 
Put my dead gtx295 card in the oven, bought it for $50 on ebay knowing that it was a dead card :p - And I can't believe that it worked. I was very skeptical at first, but plays games flawlessly. Going to sell it for $350 or so and make some easy money :p
 
Eh I wouldn't sell it, it could bite you in the ass in a couple weeks when it dies and the guy who bought it is like WTF.

I'd just keep it as a primary card / back-up honestly, you only paid $50 but so far none of the cards I've baked have lasted more than a month. (I've had 3 successes, all 3 are dead again, 1 got worse after I re-baked it, and 1 worked for a week after rebaking, never tried the 3rd one.)
 
Reflowing at home is at best a temporary fix, see the XBOX success/failure stories. :)
 
Which is why I think it's wrong to resell any of these cards. I'd be pissed as fuck if I found out the last guy bought the broken card for $20 then stuck it in his oven, tested for 5 minutes and tried to sell it to me for $200 as a "lightly used card" but there are people who will do that.
 
I tried this on my card damaged from the electrical malfunction just for kicks. It didnt work for me though.

But what the hell, it was worth a shot as it has seemed to work for many people.
 
I had a Dell Inspiron 600m that would freeze and then not be able to start up again. I figured it was because the case was crappy and flexible, so the motherboard connections became loose. Sure enough after I baked the board at 425F for around 7 minutes, it worked without any problems. It would start up right away and wouldn't freeze. Thanks boardbakers!

I kinda want to buy a "broken" gtx something card on ebay and try baking it too, but they are surprisingly hard to find...
 
I can confirm that this works for mobile 7950 GTX out of a Dell M1710!

I first got a crash while gaming. Upon Reboot my screen was corrupted. Here's what that looked like on an external monitor since the card would no longer run the LCD in the laptop
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3841378748_4461058336_b.jpg

3261120617_0d5817e04c_b.jpg

3841380194_4d70e06dd1_b.jpg

3841379480_6be03d8dbe_b.jpg

Dell was unwilling to replace the card, and the alternative was spending $500-750 on a replacement at a time when 4870's were $200. Thinking initially that this was just a heat related issue I opened up the laptop and GPU. I saw what they were they were using for heat transfer on the memory, and immediately set to making new thermal transfer pads to make contact with the heatsink. This heatsink had obviously been designed for another card and reused putting the dependency for heat transfer on these foam pads dipped in thermal grease transfer to the heatsink. This had to be the problem right? I went out and got some aluminum heatsinks normally used for large electrical box cooling. Using a Dremel tool, and a fine grained hand file, I created the heat tranfer pads in the proper shapes and lapped them down to a sheen. I applied these to both top and bottom memory modules which are the main things that don't make contact well with the heatsink. Each module had two pads applied to it with non-conductive thermal grease mashed in betwen the bottom and top pad and small amount on top as well.
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Only problem was that my video card was registering lower lows and higher highs due to the better heat transfer, but I still had corruption.(These are desktop printscreens so you don't see the corruption). The heatsink provides heat dissipation to both the CPU and GPU. Also one set of the longer aluminum thermal interfaces had to have a corner cut off and rounded to fit the top portion of the heat shroud that is over two of the memory chips.(please do yourself a favor and stay well away from the chips when doing any type of machining or metal lapping as electronics and small metal debris don't mix)
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When I removed thermal pads and tried again with the factory pads the memory components were actually getting hotter, and for a short time the card functioned without artifacts.
3266642911_6673029038_o.png

I came across this post, and decided to try it. First make sure you take pictures of both sides of the card with everything possible removed so that if you do get some things falling off you know the correct orientation to put them back on. I baked my 7950 GTX @ 400 for 10 minutes. My oven is old and notoriously burns stuff so I watched it the whole time. When components started falling off I pulled the board. The 3 larger grayish components at the upper right of the picture below fell off. It should be noted that my 7850 GTX board was laid out slightly differently, and the PCI-express connector was on the bottom of the board in mini-PCI Express format. Luckily I had pictures to allow me to rearrange them on the board again. I turned the side with the fallen off components right side up and re-baked the card for 6 minutes. Let the card cool and otherwise followed the directions in the video. Now my video card works fine.
1160520940uPQ3GlfGSM_1_6_l.jpg

As for fixing the one broken star bitted tension screw I borrowed another screw from within the laptop that had the same thread dimensions.
4095765673_a1f0045444_b.jpg

Then used that plus the original tension bracket from the star bitted tension screw to secure that portion of the shroud. It wasn't easy to do this but it is doable. You have to start the shorter screw before all the other then systematically go and tighten them all a little bit until they are all secure.
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Hope that helps someone. As I'm not the only one experiencing these problems with micro-fissures in the solder.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=U6f&q=7950+GTX++red+lines&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=rm0&q=7950+GTX++corrupt&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
 
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If anybody failed at this, and F-ed up their cards, I'm looking for a power mosfet, APM2509N... if your video card has one, i'd like to pick it up for shipping :)

Please shoot me a PM if you can help... I have an EVGA 9600gso that needs help :)
 
dell extended the warranty for 1 additional year on systems that use the the affected nVidia chips. Problem is nVidia has not been totally honest about all of the chips that were affected (like older ones), My next dell will have an ATi chipset.
 
CONFIRMED

10min @ 400f

My MSI 8800GTX was causing hard freezes and artifacts (not heat-related). I was ready to buy a new card but figured I'd try this for the hell of it. I've only played a few hours of Americas Army and Fallout 3 but so far so good (before it could only play a game for a minute or so before it would freeze with artifacts).

Even if it doesn't permanently fix it this is a handy trick to buy time.
 
mpsmith said:
CONFIRMED

10min @ 400f

My MSI 8800GTX was causing hard freezes and artifacts (not heat-related). I was ready to buy a new card but figured I'd try this for the hell of it. I've only played a few hours of Americas Army and Fallout 3 but so far so good (before it could only play a game for a minute or so before it would freeze with artifacts).

Even if it doesn't permanently fix it this is a handy trick to buy time.
Click to expand...

nice, thanks for posting!
 
Confirmed again on an 8800GTX 756MB and a 9800GTX 512MB. 10 mins @ 400F. Didn't bother taking the stickers off this time, they survived.
 
sorry for chiming in so late but...

IN THE OVEN?? F'REAL?

my 8800gts 640 just bit the dust and I started a thread to look for a replacement...
you think this can help me?

here's what happened to mine:

I was playing CoD4
during play, the screen went to a greenish screen (i could still kinda see CoD4 in the background)
then a quick orange-ish screen... then kaput.

I could hear sound but my monitor went into standby because it was not receiving signal.

Haven't been able to see anything since. I can log into windows blindly and I can hear it all boot up
I'm assuming it's the vid card no?

on a related note - I noticed that one of my w/c tubes kinda tweaked a capicitor (i think that's what it is) and it's kinda loose. :<
Click to expand...

picture of tube and capacitor or w/e that is:
photo.jpg
 
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Lol, engineering at its finest. Bowling balls in an oven I've heard of. GPUs, on the other hand...
 
JoeBoomz said:
Confirmed again on an 8800GTX 756MB and a 9800GTX 512MB. 10 mins @ 400F. Didn't bother taking the stickers off this time, they survived.
Click to expand...

Yea the stickers on mine just turned a light tan color instead of being white... hehe...
 
ok - will adjust... ty gulkor - if things don't work out, i may be gifting you a paperweight lol
 
out of the oven and cooling down...

/playbyplay

*edit - i can smell something solder-like... i think that's a good thing
 
BUAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

IT WORKED !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

thank you hardforum and all my fellow geeky inhabitants

VIVA EL DURO !!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Hah, this worked on an artifacting 9800 Pro. 9 minutes at 375F.

Previously, would heavily artifact as soon as it boot into XP.

Now it's running fine, even played some Dawn of War.
 
Just fixed an Xbox360 this way. Cheap oven spiked to 450F, turned it off right away and left it in for 10 minutes. Some of the electrolytic caps bulged slightly, but for now at least it works again. I reused the original X clamps as well so it only cost me a little thermal grease and electricity.
 
I wonder how this would work on a motherboard... as in would the plastic parts like the PCI slots, CPU socket, etc survive?

I've got a couple of old socket 754 boards that died mysteriously and I'd like to get them working again.

Hmmm... maybe time for a couple of experiments. :D
 
More than a few people have reported success with this when baking laptops (after stripping any of the plastic enclosure away from the actual mobo of 'course), so yea it should work fine with a mobo. You can probably play it safe and remove some of the largest plastic parts (like sockets) but I think it'd take even more heat to melt stuff like that and PCI slots or RAM clips.
 
you could always give the plastic bits foil hats to help protect them
 
sorry if this has been covered before (though i've read all the posts, looked at the pictures, and can't find detailed instructions) but i'm considering baking my alienware 51m graphics card NVIDIA 5600 FX GO and i'd really appreciate it if someone could advise me which bits to strip off the card before i put it in the oven.

Though i'm perfectly happy taking computers to pieces, i've never taken the invidividual components to pieces and don't know where begin. Will I need special tools - everyone makes it sound so easy that i can't imagine i'd need special tools for the job - and will it then be easy to reassemble?

I know i've got nothing to lose but i'd like to try and get it right first time.
many thanks in anticipation
 
misspea said:
sorry if this has been covered before (though i've read all the posts, looked at the pictures, and can't find detailed instructions) but i'm considering baking my alienware 51m graphics card NVIDIA 5600 FX GO and i'd really appreciate it if someone could advise me which bits to strip off the card before i put it in the oven.

Though i'm perfectly happy taking computers to pieces, i've never taken the invidividual components to pieces and don't know where begin. Will I need special tools - everyone makes it sound so easy that i can't imagine i'd need special tools for the job - and will it then be easy to reassemble?

I know i've got nothing to lose but i'd like to try and get it right first time.
many thanks in anticipation
Click to expand...

does the card you are referring to look similar to the picture?

Quadro_FX_770m_3qtr_med.png
 
worked for my bfg 8800gt OC, it would artifact and then go to a blank screen right after loading the windows desktop, after baking for about 8 min. works fine again.
 
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