Review How a dead GFX Card is made alive professionally.

How a dead GFX Card is made alive professionally.

In this article I will show you how a dead graphics card is repaired. No oven baking, no do-it-yourself type trikes, just a pure professional repairs.
Meet the victim, my old no display, dead ATI-Radeon X1650 graphics card.

SI8zWca.jpg


Removing the heat sink.
CLn2O4k.jpg

ut9h8t7.jpg

NhpdqQx.jpg


Thermal compound on the chip cleaned.
9jmUOhY.jpg


Now circuit board is installed on a BGA chip reflow machine.
6tk9uJW.jpg


Heater head mounted properly.
5H3zvqN.jpg


Machine in action
cG0T5Ji.jpg


Within a minute chip is out.
CEt9EJO.jpg


There is very little space between chip and circuit board approx. 0.1mm still you can see their is dust under the chip. This dust, heat and moisture together sometimes oxides and breaks these fine connection resulting a GPU failure.
AWkM6NW.jpg


Chip is mounted on a reballing mount.
NkbxtO0.jpg


You can see many connection pins have gone black due to dust and oxide layer.
mc7vRX6.jpg


Heat cleaning the chip connection terminal.
F7EYxVq.jpg

6uhe1nJ.jpg

WbBtM7P.jpg

ybGFuqj.jpg


Preparing the chip for new BGA soldering balls. Flux, 0.6mm lead free soldering BGA balls and grid.
VBTOEcs.jpg


Some close look on BGA soldering balls
xV5utqN.jpg

S93ofI0.jpg

4G0kjfs.jpg

VlHrz9H.jpg


Grid aliened, chip ready for reballing.
z2zsxPC.jpg

gj3nyLn.jpg


Ball properly falls into place.
y1t0iNc.jpg


All missed holes are carefully populated with a ball using a fine needle.
Nm4WXkd.jpg


Perfect. New shiny ball are in place. Looks nice
FF6uUNP.jpg

yoDPr7a.jpg


Little heat for removal of any excise flux applied during the ball placement stage.
GcnvL5p.jpg


Now chip is carefully placed back on the circuit and controlled heat is applied for re-soldering.
VOL9EOP.jpg


Perfect chip re-soldering
zhcSpwL.jpg

wPLqIj7.jpg


New thermal compound is applied and heat sink installed.
cGABFAM.jpg

D5oAsXv.jpg


Test system ready. Now is the time that will show whether the GPU is back to life or gone forever.
hlghiZY.jpg


It’s live.. Success.
rtekl9T.jpg

kpUJtA2.jpg


Some GTA san andreas run shows that GPU is 100% fine.

Hope you like this article.

Regards
Rakesh Sharma

Source / More Info
 
Last edited:
AMD and NVidia sell their chips to OEM only that too in big quantity. Only fake or refurbished chips are available in market.. I usually don't have faith in such Chines dealers. Getting single chip from abroad for just a repair is way too expensive and only practical if you are fixing an expensive card.
 
My ATI 6850 went kaput, i found a chip on ebay for 20$, and i paid the repair guy 1000/- . The chip was brand new, card is working fine for last 3 months now.
 
Back
Top