Trouble can happen not only with NVIDIA RTX, but also with AMD Radeon graphics cards. We bought one such trouble on the secondary market.
It was a hardware repair company called Northwest Repairs, is known for its YouTube videos, literally reanimated AMD RX 7800 XT graphics cardwhich seems to have been revived by less professional hands before. The card was taken to a soldering station and started working after some replacements.
The owner had purchased this XFX Speedster 7800 XT Merc 319 on Facebook Marketplace, but it showed no signs of “life” and was brought to Northwest Repairs. Inspection showed flux residue all over the board, indicating a previous attempt at re-soldering (apparently unsuccessful). The GPU core seemed to be intact, but its bezel broke off when touched. According to the repairman, this reduced the chances of success to 0.1%, but since the chip itself was intact, there was minimal hope.
The correct way to re-solder is to use a soldering station, with short-term heating and temperature control. Careless “baking” of the PCB can cause thermal deformation up to the point of cracking the board and even the processor. Further actions showed that the video card had not been damaged to this extent before.
The resoldering went quite smoothly — as if it were a professional job. The heating was monitored by a thermal imager to quickly eliminate any suspicious processes. It immediately demonstrated sudden bursts of heat. Moreover, a memory test showed that three chips were faulty. This could be the reason for the failure of the previous attempt — faulty contacts or the memory blocks themselves. Accordingly, the video card did not boot.
The repairman first resoldered the memory and then replaced one of the blocks, and the video card started working. It received new thermal pads because the original thermal interface was “junk to begin with.” Tony from Northwest Repairs adds a tidbit about the non-human biological residue on the card.
Was the second-hand purchase justified? It’s unlikely, as the card could have initially had damage incompatible with “life”, and repairs are not free. The author of the news once bought a GTX 960 for half the price, which was known to be soldered and working. The card could not withstand even minimal overclocking attempts, but it worked for two years until it was replaced.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
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