Is This Fixable?

oldmanbal

oldmanbal

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Local guy pulled off some components when he lifted a headsink off his 1080. I know the memory should be able to get soldered right back in place, but does it look like some of the pins from the chips were pulled off the board? Would they be able to go back without issue? Can the little black memory caps be put back in place? Haven't seen a video of someone resoldering those.

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Let me know what you think. Looks like it could either be a quick and easy fix or just another dead card. It would cost me 100$ for the card, and I'd plan on putting it into an old system to sell instead of the 970 in it now.
 
It would be easier to order new memory chips that are pre-balled. After that, you'd need to clean the pads on the card and prefill them with new solder using a pad-leveling tip. Then put the whole board on a preheating plate. Coat the prefilled lands with flux. Then place the memory chip on the board and reflow it with hot air. --then hope everything soldered properly since doing BGA prefilled lands by hand won't be 100% even and you could have gaps. Without x-ray inspection you can't be sure, but most of the time it works fine if you've had some practice.

You can view IPC-7711 section 5.7.1 for the rework procedure. For the same rework procedure, but using solder paste with a stencil, you can view section 5.7.2. The only difference is the pre-filled land solder applicaiton.

The first thing I would do is clean the pads to make sure none have been torn away from the board/trace. Then if they are all good, you can proceed with the memory replacement. However if two chips have already been ripped away from board which is quite an impressive feat, I'm sure other memory chips have broken solder joints. You'll want to reflow everything and hope nothing has a torn pad underneath.
 
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Looking at it again, there are also a bunch of other components missing -- capacitors, at least one VRM controller (if this is a reference design), some of the 0402/0602 birdseed (R or C), etc. It honestly looks like a chisel was used to remove the parts.. haha.

edit: nm, I see a few stuck to the heatsinks in the first pic.
 
Do you have the expertise and equipment to reflow / re-solder those components yourself?

In principle, yes, it's fixable. But probably not by you unless you're an electronics expert.
 
In my amateur opinion: no.

Soldering these back on is (relatively speaking) easy mode, assuming you can separate the components from the heatsink in order to have physical access to the tight spaces (also assuming it did not rip the metal connection out of the components stuck on the heatsink). Also assumes you have more equipment than just a soldering iron.
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This on the other hand:
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Not happening. The copper spots are the pads being ripped from the PCB. Those will never connect again. And that is just taking a cursory glance, the stuff that jumps out at me, not even taking a second look to see if anything else is missing/damaged.

Again, experience with BGA components is limited (I am not the RazorWind you are looking for), but ripped pads like that tend to be a non-starter.

(To be extremely nitpicky: technically anything is repairable, e.g. this actual pad replacement:


... but that's next-level stuff)

>multi-edit: more I look, more i see more stuff missing. Rip
 
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How exactly did he take the heatsink off? Tie it to a ford f150 bumper and go on a 5 mile drive with it attached?
 
oldmanbal said:
Local guy pulled off some components when he lifted a headsink off his 1080. I know the memory should be able to get soldered right back in place, but does it look like some of the pins from the chips were pulled off the board? Would they be able to go back without issue? Can the little black memory caps be put back in place? Haven't seen a video of someone resoldering those.

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Let me know what you think. Looks like it could either be a quick and easy fix or just another dead card. It would cost me 100$ for the card, and I'd plan on putting it into an old system to sell instead of the 970 in it now.
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Probably not fixable. See how some of the copper colored dots on the bottom of the memory ICs have little tails? That's part of the trace, which means that it ripped some of the pads off of the board. What you're seeing is the underside of the copper layer. Louis Rossmann sometimes demonstrates a technique for replacing torn BGA pads, but I've never seen it get done on an IC this big, with pads this small. I don't think it would work in this particular case, but to be fair, I haven't ever tried, and I've been wrong plenty of times.

The SMD caps should probably be replaced (and they're pricy), but resoldering those is a piece of cake. You can do that with a soldering iron, easy peasy.
 
As someone who does electronics assembly for a living, I would declare it scrap because of the torn-away pads. If they were just lifted slightly, you could repair them. You might get away with just leaving the memory chips off and repairing the other pulled components. Did they guy epoxy the heatsinks to those components? Good grief. You will need to replace those components that were pulled off as they were damaged. I would also reflow many of the solders joints of the components that did not get pulled-off in case of broken joints.
 
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