For the first project I chose something easy. A GPU, which artifacts… sometimes. Well, almost never, but still, driver doesn’t like the card at all – with it I get a black screen and Windows crashes. GPU shows common fail patterns, mostly artifacts, associated with dead VRAM, so I’ll start with that. Let’s boot up my bench and see what MATS spits out.
Problems… obviously.
Before I could even test this card there were at least 2 problems, let’s start with the first one: motherboard couldn’t boot from the USB drive prompting “XZ-compressed data is corrupt”. Fix was easy enough – reimage the pendrive.
Another thing – black screen after loading drivers, even the MODS ones. Fix was also really easy – delete the autorun and just use MATS.
Ready? Let’s start!
Now here is something unusual – GPU that both fails and passes the MATS test. Truly the Schrödinger graphics card. But for real, both tests show that there are errors at memory F0, only one bit – F04. Likely this is either mechanical damage or corrosion that caused this failure. I could probably just reflow this VRAM IC, as almost for sure it’s good, but this time, just to be sure, I’ll replace it. Let’s preheat the PCB and remove this chip.
Some of You probably don’t even use the preheater, but I myself am not a professional (yet :)) and to increase my chances of not ripping the pads and not stressing the GPU and PCB itself use my BGA machine on bottom heater only at ~150°C.
20 minutes later GPU is back together and ready to be tested.
As You can see it’s a glorious success! There are no more artifacts and MATS report is clean. Last thing to do is stress test the GPU by using for example 3DMark or Furmark. I personally like to use the UNIGINE Heaven though.
Well then, I’m off to test this card.
Thanks for reading!