I have an Intel Atom Bay Trail ASRock J1900M motherboard that started throwing CPU errors and kernel panic early in the boot process. I was debating whether I wanted to try the oven trick people use for GPU’s. or just give up on the thing since it kinda sucked compared to my later N3150M motherboard. I put it off for a couple months and forgot about it.
A couple weeks ago I saw a picture, (I believe on Reddit) where instead of using an oven, someone took some aluminum foil, cut out a square to help shield the components around the GPU, and hit it with a heat gun to reflow the solder and get their GPU working. I’m sure there are better ways to go about it than I did, but I basically did the same thing and was able to get the machine up and running.
I haven’t spent enough time with it to see how well it works or how long it will last, but going from a kernel panic/no boot situation to working as expected is fairly impressive even if it only helps me squeeze out a few more months of service. I have a laptop with an Intel Atom Braswell 3700N that has been acting up really bad and I might give this a try before looking for a replacement board. I was fortunate with the J1900M with the kernel panic specifically telling me where my problem was.
I didn’t take a picture as it was late and there wasn’t much to see, just a piece of foil with a square cut out over the die package. I took the beat up old steel case side panel and preheated that a bit. I put the motherboard in place with everything removed, including the RAM and battery as not to bork them. I set a couple of bolts on the foil so it wouldn’t blow away. I put the cheap Harbor Freight heat gun on low and would apply heat for several seconds on, 1 second off to avoid getting hot spots. Once I got a faint wiff of new motherboard smell wafting out I dropped it down to about 3 seconds on, 1 second off. I did that for about another minute.
I was going to try and set something up with a small bit of solder and extra flux in a tiny cap or something to see when I got the heat high enough to melt solder, but I didn’t bother. I blasted it with high heat for 10 seconds at the end for good measure, let it cool down for 10 minutes and reassembled. Eetz alive!
I thought the more DIY minded people around here might be interested in this. I wanted to get a heat gun decades ago, but never bothered until early last year. I paid $9 and it paid me back within a few weeks of owning it. I’ve come up with so many random uses for it that I can’t even remember them all. Now it’s breathed new life in to a motherboard. I wish I had tried this years ago when I had been given a couple of flaky GPU’s. At least I know now so if I come across any more in the future I can give this a try. It might not be worth the risk on something expensive that could be professionally repaired, but for this board it was worth a shot and it paid off!