Fixing a non-booting graphics card at the component level?
Posted: Mon Jul 22, 2013 11:31 am
I have an old 6600GT AGP. It's 8 and a half years now and it's just 'decided not to work anymore'. It was running Furmark and only at 71C on the core given my 5 volted Socket A heatsink mod . Then it froze. Now it doesn't boot at all. Cross-testing with other hardware shows that it is the card that has failed.
It's definitely not the GPU itself overheating due to the heatsink and memory generally doesn't just go pop so I'm looking at the ancillaries on the card and as this is an AGP model with the HSI bridge, there's quite a few! Maybe something else got to hot even though the core was running cool.
I don't like throwing things away and as it's already out of service I thought I'd have a crack at trying to diagnose and fix the board itself. I've already removed the cooler, totally cleaned up the card and reassembled but to no avail. The next stage would be trying to measure voltages on different parts of the card to see if it is getting voltage through to the core and memory. What I would like to try is the solder reflowing technique popularised by people putting cards in their kitchen oven and just melting the solder enough to fix any bad connections. The card is already not working so I can't make it worse so no harm in trying.
Does anyone have any experience in fixing graphics card problems? Cooling issues excluded of course, we can all do that. Any experience with solder reflowing or similar techniques? Any thing that worked or didn't work?
It's definitely not the GPU itself overheating due to the heatsink and memory generally doesn't just go pop so I'm looking at the ancillaries on the card and as this is an AGP model with the HSI bridge, there's quite a few! Maybe something else got to hot even though the core was running cool.
I don't like throwing things away and as it's already out of service I thought I'd have a crack at trying to diagnose and fix the board itself. I've already removed the cooler, totally cleaned up the card and reassembled but to no avail. The next stage would be trying to measure voltages on different parts of the card to see if it is getting voltage through to the core and memory. What I would like to try is the solder reflowing technique popularised by people putting cards in their kitchen oven and just melting the solder enough to fix any bad connections. The card is already not working so I can't make it worse so no harm in trying.
Does anyone have any experience in fixing graphics card problems? Cooling issues excluded of course, we can all do that. Any experience with solder reflowing or similar techniques? Any thing that worked or didn't work?