How to revive a dead geforce

Hardware Hub GPU
1

Here's my experience with reflowing a GPU AKA baking it.

I just got this artifacting XFX 8800GT Alphadog Edition (go ahead click it)

It had corrupted text from boot, red blocky lines in windows and sometimes squiggly red lines. It was basically dying

What I did was take it apart, clean it thoroughly, bake it 10 minutes at 200° C, let it cool 60 minutes, change thermal paste and put it back together. This is a known problem in this generation of cards (geforce 8), my t61p thinkpad also died of bad BGA soldering (G86). But fortunately and surprisingly some can be brought back to life for an indefinite amount of time. Here are the pictures (the first is actually after the whole ordeal for reference). The fan is incredibly loud, and the card itself isn't much faster than the intel HD4600 so I won't be using this in my PC. Still it has been a fun and nonconventional fixing experience:

 

Complete cardp2petrified paste

2

Something for future reference.

Don't use a regular oven.

Solder gives off toxic fumes when heated, and it can poison the shit out of your oven, and everything you cook.

 

3

There's very little lead in these types of solder and the card is RoHS compliant so there's probably none.

From what I've heard they use 60/40 tin lead solder or tin-copper-silver in the newer green ones. The first starts melting at 190° that's why I used 210. It melts every solder but just enough to fix the microfractures.

4

60/40 solder is not ROHS compliant since its 60% lead, a lot of lead free solder is a steel/zinc/tin alloy

5

Nvidia can cause cancer though, have you seen their prices?

6

I've always used AMD just because of the low price...  If I had money, I'd use Nvidia.  But I don't have money.  So the Radeon 7750 will have to do for me.