Graphics 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.



Removing the heat sink.




Thermal compound on the chip cleaned.


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


Heater head mounted properly.


Machine in action


Within a minute chip is out.


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.


Chip is mounted on a reballing mount.


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


Heat cleaning the chip connection terminal.





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


Some close look on BGA soldering balls





Grid aliened, chip ready for reballing.



Ball properly falls into place.


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


Perfect. New shiny ball are in place. Looks nice



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


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


Perfect chip re-soldering



New thermal compound is applied and heat sink installed.



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


It’s live.. Success.



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

Hope you like this article.

Regards
Rakesh Sharma

 

Wow! That is incredibly interesting! Thanks for sharing

 

Indeed, very interesting.
Probably dumb question or a obvious yes, but when applying the solder balls to the chip is it just flux that is holding them in place on the contacts until heat is applied ?

 

Enjoyed reading that thank you buddy.

Nice to see how it's done properly, does this method work the majority of the time?

 

That seems simple enough to do. Where do I get the kit, B&Q.

But seriously very interesting.

 

Very impressive, so who actually does this work, independent companies or the GPU manufacturers, is this what's considered a 'Reconditioned' card?

 

Just flux

 

Yes most of time this works unless you have some major chip issues.

 

Super impressive and interesting. This would have been a great Custom PC article.

 

That BGA kit looks quite specific to your chip. May I ask how did you obtain it?

 

Thanks for sharing. Very interesting indeed.

 

great article. Where did you come across this, and whose kit is its?

 

Fascinating. Looks kinda fun.

 

Cool!

Thanks for sharing, nice to see how these things are done!

 

Really interesting, thanks for that.

 

I wish I could reflow chips that big! My reflow station is not big enough.

 

I remember my days reflowing and reballing console chips and the occasional laptop GPU (with a cheap&nasty Jovy station). Always amusing to see attempted 'fixes' (e.g. removing the X-clamp and replacing it with bolts!).

 

Thank you very much for viewing my article and very happy that you all enjoyed it the same as I love doing it.. Will sharing more like this.

 

Really interesting - nice to see professional work.

 

Very cool and insightful!

I am shocked to see all the dust under the chip, I had no idea that was possible!