Both of these repairs I’m going to remember for a long time, I haven’t been this confused in literal ages. What was wrong? You’re going to have to stick around to find out.
Case 1: Radeon HD6970
Let’s start with a classic, shall we?
Seriously, what’s wrong with me, I’m like a magnet for Caymans with broken coolers.
Anyway, I got it as “untested”.
“Yeah, right, I totally believe You.”
And turns out it works. Or, at the very least sort of “works”. I got it to display the BIOS screen for enough time to see that it doesn’t artifact, but I didn’t manage to take a picture before it shut down. What’s more, backside of the PCB, right where the core is, was extremely hot.
Such behaviour can pretty much only be explained by one specific thing – overheating.
On the GPU side I can only say that the thermal paste turned into a literal rock.
Heatsink side though…
I have one question…
HOW?
Backplate is straight, !SPOILER ALERT! GPU works fine and also isn’t a banana, how do You bend the heatsink along with the frontplate like that then?
After straight up staring at this phenomenom for a few minutes I realised that I still had the board itself to test.
…
So, I made this contraption.
Before You ask, yes, You’re right, I won’t be able to fully test it due to no cooling on VRM, VRAM and not even enough cooling for the core itself.
I will be able to go to Windows though.
It works, at least to some extent. It goes without saying, but after obtaining a proper hetsink I’ll need to properly test it.
But I don’t have a suitable heatsink for now, so that’s about as far as I can go with this card.
Case 2: ASUS GTX 580
I wanted to upgrade my ‘retro’ PC with SLI GTX 580, so I got this one, reportedly not working – overheating and artifacts.
“Overheating” and “Fermi” are quite common together, You probably can guess what’s going to happen next.
Let’s adress the “artifacting” first. I really got artifacts, but on HDMI only, DVI was fine. Additionally, artifacting only happened when I was moving the cable.
First thought? Broken port.
But no, it looked like new, plastic insert was there and all pins weren’t mangled.
Taking it apart and looking closely at the back of the port revealed that there was some gunk on a few pins.
Surely enough, thorough cleaning helped.
With that done, time for a delid.
Fortunately no damage this time.
While doing this procedure I noticed something worrying. Look between the substrate and the screw on the right. There is flux residue, so very likely it was reflowed.
You know the drill of preparing the delidded core, same as with the 8800 GTXs, but this time I went more extreme – I used a grinder to remove epoxy and some thickness at the corners.
Mats reported no errors after delidding so I got a green light to proceed.
Except there was one tiny problem.
Fans didn’t spin.
I can see where the overheating would come from.
Easiest things first – check if fans work.
Fans – ✓
More difficult things second – check the fan connector on the PCB.
Sorry, no pictures of measurements, but I have a picture of something that I call “I’m calling to You about Your cards extended cables.”
Anyway, I got 9V on fan connector.
Fans – ✓
Fan connector – ✓
What’s wrong with it then?
Buckle up, because You’re not going to believe me.
Fan connector was installed backwards.
???
How?
It didn’t even look reworked at all.
Now, would You look at that. A simple fix for a simple problem.
It’s a shame that I didn’t take a picture before fixing the connector, it was showing fan speed in percent, but 0 RPM.
With that said I tested this card some more and didn’t get any more problems, so I consider it fully fixed.
Thanks for reading!