I have a 7950 with a blown SMD capacitor and am wondering if anyone has any solution to fixing it. Here is the picture:
The card doesn't have warranty, and I have a feeling just soldering the same capacitor on there probably won't suffice, so please help if you can.
You need to try and find the cards schematics. This will outline each and every component. In this case you need to try and find the part number of the blown part.
This may not actually be a capacitor, as surface mount resistors and capacitors look nearly identical. So you do need to find what part it is.
Usually this will blow to prevent damage elsewhere on the card (like in the GPU for example) so the card might work if it were successfully repaired.
The schematics won't be published.
But if you can still read the spec of the cap that's blown, you can desolder the blown cap, and then airbridge a normal cap with the same spec (also tolerance!) as the SMD. If you try to solder an SMD component, you'll probably fry it, so replace with a normal one, it should work just as well.
When doing soldering on the PCB, one thing is very very very important: use metal clips to divert the heat from the PCB and the surrounding devices on the spot where you'll be soldering, solder as quickly as possible with as little heat to the PCB as possible. The traces on those PCB's (and those are double sided) are very fragile, you'll burn them out in no time.
Did you find out why the cap blew? Maybe there is another problem that needs to be solved to prevent recurrence?