General question : Repairing graphic cards

[newbie1]

Hi Guys,

just wondering whether anybody here ever repair graphic cards with no visible capacitor defect?
I have a bunch of AGP & PCIE graphic cards confirmed faulty by replacing them with a known good one. They have symptoms like :

- No display but fan spinning
- Display but fan not spinning.
- No boot-up at all.
- Boot up but display is having snowy lines.
- Display flickering (shutting down & re-start) - not monitor problem.

Or do you guys think they are not economically not worth it & BIN them?

thanks for your input, guys..

[shovenose]

Re: General question : Repairing graphic cards

Fixing them sounds nice. AFAIK, bad capacitors, stuck fans, and faulty solder are the three main problems.

- No display but fan spinning (reflow)
- Display but fan not spinning. (new fan)
- No boot-up at all. (no clue)
- Boot up but display is having snowy lines. (try underclocking/undervolting)
- Display flickering (shutting down & re-start) - not monitor problem. (no clue)

[newbie1]

Re: General question : Repairing graphic cards

Yes if i can only fix them, then it would be REALLY awesome.. Having a self-made scrapyard full of ATI & NVDIA GPUs, is definitely not.. heh!.. I guess the low cost of it wouldn't be cost effective & time wasting to repair them.. & so far i have not seen a schematics for it as well.. yet.

[goodpsusearch]

Re: General question : Repairing graphic cards

I would start with the easiest cases, for example the cards that work normally, but the cooler fan is stuck.

Then I would proceed to the gpus with bad caps etc.

[Agent24]

Re: General question : Repairing graphic cards

I have heard that the BGA RAM or GPU can have soldering issues.

You can reheat with hot air or in oven... but I think what you really need to do is remove the chip and do a full re-balling and reflow.

Either way, you have nothing to lose if the cards don't work now. The worst that can happen is they still don't work afterwards.

[crepiduse]

Re: General question : Repairing graphic cards

I have repaired some ATI and NVIDIA cards with no clean flux and hot air, just make sure you have proper cooling to the chipset after. 9/10 with bad connections (snowy picture or no picture with good caps) are fixable this way.... How long it will work, is unknown, I have one I fixed a year ago still working fine, if done right it should last just as well as a reflow. Flux it, heat the board, then slowly heat the chip, then slowly lower temp back to cool, then let sit for cool down and wha-la, working board. Same repair as XBOX360's or DV series laptops.