Review How a dead GFX Card is made alive professionally.

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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.

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Removing the heat sink.
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Thermal compound on the chip cleaned.
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Now circuit board is installed on a BGA chip reflow machine.
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Heater head mounted properly.
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Machine in action
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Within a minute chip is out.
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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.
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Chip is mounted on a reballing mount.
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You can see many connection pins have gone black due to dust and oxide layer.
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Heat cleaning the chip connection terminal.
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Preparing the chip for new BGA soldering balls. Flux, 0.6mm lead free soldering BGA balls and grid.
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Some close look on BGA soldering balls
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Grid aliened, chip ready for reballing.
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Ball properly falls into place.
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All missed holes are carefully populated with a ball using a fine needle.
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Perfect. New shiny ball are in place. Looks nice
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Little heat for removal of any excise flux applied during the ball placement stage.
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Now chip is carefully placed back on the circuit and controlled heat is applied for re-soldering.
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Perfect chip re-soldering
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New thermal compound is applied and heat sink installed.
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Test system ready. Now is the time that will show whether the GPU is back to life or gone forever.
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It’s live.. Success.
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Some GTA san andreas run shows that GPU is 100% fine.

Hope you like this article.

Regards
Rakesh Sharma

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Excellent stuff as always.

Can you please explain reballing process in more detail? I didn't get how those balls stick/solder to the chip.
 
I am AWESTRUCK !
yes that is some Repair Porn!

any chance you'd open a No Warranty, GPU Necro/Zombification service? (for a decent fee of course)
 
Really loved the post.! By the way, where is the machine available? in mumbai?? I heard that in laptop services, major failures are of graphic chips & reflowing/ reballing is done to rectify the same. Thanks for posting!
 
Hey rakesh, do you have any pics of the card minus the processor installed on top of it? Like what does the card look like without the processing chip installed on it?
 
How do I like this? HOW DO I LIKE THIS ?!!!!

Awesomeance at work - the joy of seeing a dead Gfx card come alive is worth all this effort !!! terrific work Rakesh !!
 
So I am getting many PMs asking for GFX repair.

OK If you want a GFX Card repair , first I want to make some points clear.
  • You have to pay shipping to and for, to city Jodhpur..
  • Rs.500 each will be charged only if card get fixed.(money goes to machine owner)
  • No warranty on repair.
  • Will have to give me time of more than 2-3 weeks as have access to machine on Sundays only.
  • Dont send fully burned cards..

******Shipping risk is all yours.

If all fine for you PM me.
 
Question - in the case of my faulty card I think its a RAM chip thats gone wonky rather than the GPU itself.

The GPU boots fine, runs for a while and then over time, vertical "glitches" tend to start forming on screen.

Can you fix a potentially faulty RAM chip as well and if so, how much would this cost?

Do let me know...
 
Replacing GPU chip or RAM chip is not possible cos spare chips are not available. Chip manufacturers provide chips to only OEM guys.. So only connection or power related issues can be attended.
 
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