"Baking your "bad" video card" worked for me!

[abel]

So...my daughter was using my old Nvidia 9800gtx+ till recently. The card failed and the pc would not even post. A quick check of the card on another sys confirmed it as bad. Daughters PC gets a new 460gtx and I was about to throw the 9800gtx+ out.

Then I remembered something about baking your bad video card to try and fix them.

I proceeded to strip the card of it heat sync ( reference one ), cleaned the thermal paste of the gpu and others...placed the card on an aluminum covered tray... wrapped the card in foil as well making sure the end caps were off the tray surface with a "ball" of foil. Components facing down.

Preheated the oven to 385 deg F. Placed the card in for 10 minutes. After which I let the card air cool still covered in foil.

A new dab of thermal compound on the GPU..reattached the heat sync...plugged it into my extra pc that still runs WinXP Pro and the thing went thru post. Got to the desktop nary an error or artifact to be seen.

It still works three days later and I've been playing old games on it....FarCry1..STALKER1 and some older titles that will not run all that well in my Win7 rig.

Don't know how long it will last but for now I resuscitated a card that I was ready to throw out....

[Activate: AMD]

I've seen this method mooted elsewhere. something about softening up the crummy solder nvidia used on their FCBGA mountings, which was prone to developing fractures that would render the card kaputt. I always figured that if one of my cards went belly up, I might as well try it.. the success rate seems surprisingly high!

[mpulliam]

...no pot/baked jokes?

...no parmesean or Hells Kitchen jokes?



Gratz on the rez. I love making hardware last well beyond its years too.

-=M=-

[bmaverick]

Got to PDF this tip off and save for a rainy day. Thanks!

[Dman]

Did this to a EVGA Geforce 8800 gtx , it worked for about a year .

[oralpain]

I've done this on several GPUs, various DIMMs, and at least one motherboard, over the last decade, with mixed results (works about 50% of the time).

Definitely worth a try if you have reason to suspect cracked BGA solder balls are the issue, or you have exhausted all other options.

One of these days I'll have to invest in a good IR lamp to improve my success rate.