Going with the theme of my previous posts I decided to tackle the MSI Radeon 9800XT again. It has beaten me once before, with a dead VRAM.
Let’s see where I left it…
Right…
BGA DDR VRAM artifacting. This picture I took when the GPU in question was used as an output device. I’ve proven before that it likes to mess with DMGG output.
Right. Artifacts, 1044487 errors and 0 broken ICs.
I noticed that when I touched top of the GPU artifacts were changing. This would mean that one or two… or four IC had a bad connection.
Without further ado I fired up my BGA rework station and went right to it.
I started with back chips, because why not?
When I was reballing ICs that I stole off of a dead Nvidia GPU I took a look at the heatsink.
This is the thermal something that MSI used on the core. After more than 20 years it literally turned into awful-looking diamonds. Or at the very least its hardness has. I had to scrape it with a knife, because no amount of heat made any difference while trying to clean it.
After replacing these 2 VRAM ICs I went back to the DMGG.py tester. Here are the results I’ve gotten:
Cool, eh?
Having good chips for once really made a difference.
I’ve heard that early R350 cores were manufactured with a defect – die was too low compared to the metal shim on the edge. Some early cards were not manufactured with a bump on the heatsink, which was paired with lack of a thermal diode lead to the core cooking itself alive. Later heatsinks were fixed, but I don’t remember any core from 9XXX lineup with a thermal sensor.
This core is a R360, which I believe missed all the fun, but its heatsink still has a bump for the silicon die.
As thermopads were dry as Sahara desert I decided to replace them with thermal putty.
Hold up, what is that?
Enhance, Enhance, ENHANCE
Obviously, when something goes right something has to break. Thankfully it was only a THT capacitor.
After replacing this part I was ready for a test.
Surely enough it works as intended. I can’t check the exact core temperature, but PCB remains fairly cool and what’s more impressive quite quiet. I expeced the fan to need new bearings, but honestly it’s fine. I didn’t even need to oil it yet.
Thanks for reading!