DIY video card repair with a hairdryer

This guide will focus on warming up chips at home. This operation often helps in cases when the laptop refuses to turn on or is experiencing other serious problems with the chipset or video card.

This measure serves to diagnose a malfunction with a particular chip. It temporarily allows you to restore the functionality of the chip. To solve the problem, you usually need to replace the chip itself or the entire board.

Problems with the operation of the chipset (the chipset is one or two large microcircuits on the motherboard) are manifested in the malfunctioning of various ports (USB, SATA, etc.) and the laptop refusing to turn on. Problems with a video card are usually accompanied by image defects, errors after installing drivers from the video chip manufacturer's website, as well as the laptop's refusal to turn on.

Similar problems are very common in laptops with defective video cards. nVidia 8-seriesas well as with chipsets nVidia... This primarily concerns the chipset MCP67which is used in laptops Acer Aspire 4220, 4520, 5220, 5520, 7220 and 7520.

What is the point of warming up? It's actually pretty simple. Often the reason for the malfunctioning of chips is a violation of the contact between the chip and the board. When the chip is heated to 220-250 degrees, the contacts of the chip with the substrate and the substrate with the motherboard are soldered. This allows you to temporarily restore the functionality of the chip. “Temporarily” in this case very much depends on the specific case. It can be days and weeks, or months and years.

This guide is intended for those whose laptop no longer works and, in general, have nothing to lose. If your laptop works, then it is better not to interfere with it and close this manual.

1) The most correct way is to use a soldering station. They are mainly used in service centers. There, the temperature and airflow can be precisely controlled. This is how they look:

Since soldering stations at home are extremely rare, you will have to look for other options.

A useful thing, it is inexpensive, you can buy it without any problems. It is also possible to warm up the chips with a construction hairdryer. The main challenge is temperature control. That is why, for the task of warming up the chip, you need to look for a hair dryer with a temperature controller.

3) Warming up the chips in a conventional oven. An extremely dangerous way. It is better not to use this method at all. The danger is that not all components on the board can handle heat well. There is also a high risk of overheating the board. In this case, not only the performance of the components of the board may be disrupted, but they can also be trivially soldered from it and fall off. In these cases, further repairs are meaningless. You need to buy a new board.

This guide will cover heating the chip at home using a hair dryer.

1) Building hair dryer. Requirements for it are low. The most important requirement is the ability to smoothly adjust the outlet air temperature to at least 250 degrees. The thing is that we will need to set the outlet air temperature at the level of 220-250 degrees. In hair dryers with step adjustment, 2 values ​​are often found: 350 and 600 degrees. They don't suit us. 350 degrees is already a lot to warm up, not to mention 600. I used a hair dryer like this:

2) Aluminum foil. It is often used in cooking for baking in the oven.

3) Thermal paste. It is needed to assemble the cooling system back. Reuse of old thermal interfaces is not allowed.If the cooling system has already been removed, then when installing it back, the old thermal grease must be removed and a new one applied. What kind of thermal paste to take is discussed here: Laptop cooling. I recommend thermal pastes from ThemalTake, Zalman, Noctua, ArcticCooling and others like Titan Nano Grease. KPT-8 needs to be taken original in a metal tube. It is often faked.

I used Titan nano grease:

4) A set of screwdrivers, napkins and straight arms.

Warning: Chip warm-up is a difficult and dangerous operation. Your actions can change the state of the laptop from “slightly not working” to “not working at all”. Moreover, further repair of a laptop in a service center after such an intervention may be economically impractical. Excessive heat, static electricity, and other similar things can ruin a laptop. It should also be borne in mind that not all components tolerate high heat well. Some of them may even explode.

If you doubt your abilities, then it is better not to take up the heating of the chip and entrust this operation to the service center. Everything that you do in the future, you do at your own peril and risk. The author of this manual does not bear any responsibility for your actions and their results.

Before starting to warm up the chips, you need to have a clear idea of ​​which chips need to be heated. If you have a problem with a video card, then you need to warm up the video chip, if with a chipset, then the north and / or south bridges (in the case of MCP67 North and South bridges are combined in one microcircuit). The Laptop Repair guide and these forum topics will help you in this matter: Laptop and Video Card Won't Turn On.

When you more or less imagine which chips need to be warmed up, then you can take on the heating itself. It starts with disassembling the laptop. Before disassembling the laptop, be sure to remove the battery and unplug the laptop from the power supply. You can find instructions on how to disassemble your laptop model on the first page of this topic: Instructions for laptops.

This is how the chipset microcircuits and video chips might look like:

In the photo above, the south bridge microcircuit is located at the bottom left, the north bridge microcircuit is located at the top right of the center, the processor connector is located to the left of it.

For example, a laptop motherboard Acer Aspire 5520G:

Here the microcircuits of the north and south bridges are combined in one - MCP67... It is located in the center of the photo, just above the processor socket.

Video cards can be either removable:

So soldered into the motherboard.

Before starting to warm up, it would be nice to take care of the thermal protection of the elements surrounding the chip. After all, they do not all tolerate heating above 200 degrees well. That's what we need foil for.

Warning: Handling foil greatly increases the risk of damage to components from static electricity. This must be remembered. Read more about antistatic protection here

We take a piece of foil and cut a hole in it along the contour:

In the case of warming up video cards in the form of small boards, you can simply put them on foil.

This is already needed more to protect the table from excessive heating. The heated board with the chip must be placed strictly horizontally.

Now you need to set the temperature on the hair dryer to about 220-250 degrees. The option from 300-350 degrees and higher is not suitable since there is a possibility that the solder under the chip will melt strongly and the chip will move under the influence of air currents. In this case, you cannot do without a service center.

It takes several minutes to warm. The hair dryer should be about 10-15 cm away from the chip. This is how this process looks in the video:

Here's another video on warming up with a hairdryer: download / download (warming up the video chip. Everything is shown in detail) download / download and download / download (warming up the video card with household hair dryers)

After such a warm-up, the patient (HP Pavillion dv5) came to life and started working

After warming up, we assemble the laptop and do not forget about replacing the thermal paste with a new one (Replacing the thermal paste in a laptop).

I ask you to state all questions on heating up the chips in this forum thread: Warming up the video card, chipset and other chips. Before asking questions, I urge you to read the topic.

Respectfully yours, the author of the material is Andrey Tonievich. The publication of this material is permitted only with reference to the source and with an indication of the author

Have you ever experienced your graphics card stopped working? God grant, of course, that this never happens, but still! What to do, for example, if you hear that the computer is booting, but there is no image on the monitor (black screen)?

What we usually do in such cases: substitute a known working video card (or switch to integrated video) and make sure that the problems are with the graphics adapter. But what to do in this case? Can we provide video card repair ourselves?

The good news is yes: DIY video card repair is quite possible! The bad thing is that after such a repair there is no guarantee that the video card restored in this way will work for a long time. Also, the repair itself may end unsuccessfully if we do not follow certain rules. But let's talk about everything in order! 🙂

So, we have a non-working video card from Nvidia, the GeForce 9500 GT model. Like this:

What's the problem? The video card worked for a long time in harsh temperature conditions, which led to its overheating. As a result of this, a fairly typical (in such cases) thing happened: the "dump" of the BGA chip of the video card.

Don't be scared by the word “dump”, nothing has fallen off there 🙂 This is just how the people call the electrical contact of the BGA balls array with the printed circuit board of the card that occurs as a result of prolonged overheating. Usually, this phenomenon occurs as a result of the presence of a small section of cold soldering, which is subjected to prolonged and strong heating.

This is not to say that this is a 100% marriage of the manufacturer: there can be quite a lot of tin balls in the array and the violation (or oxidation) of the contact of even one of them can lead to a complete (or partial) loss of the card's performance. So overheating, be it a video card or a central processor, is a very unpleasant thing. Try to avoid it in every possible way!

And in this situation, we have no choice but to try to repair the video card with our own hands, on our own. So, first of all, we need to take care to remove all plastic plugs on the card, stickers (stickers) located on the back side from the card. Anything in the area of ​​the graphics chip can melt.

Yes Yes! You heard right: to melt. After all, we will repair the video card by heating it, and all the “unnecessary” need to be removed, just for every fireman. Of course, perhaps nothing like this will happen, but just make it a habit - it will come in handy 🙂

We will also need to remove the fan and cooling system. We do this with whatever is more convenient for us. Personally, I use this screwdriver with interchangeable nozzles:

We unscrew the screws securing the fan, remove the metal cover and get the following picture:

As you can see, the cooling system requires thorough cleaning, and the fan itself needs preventive maintenance, since its efficiency has decreased due to lime adhered to the blades and dust crammed into the bearing.

The next step is to remove the GPU heatsink. It would seem: what is so difficult here? But, as one movie hero said in a film about various evil spirits: "There is a catch everywhere!" Here it lies in the fact that often (especially if the chip was operated in a severe temperature regime), when dry, the thermal paste tightly glues the crystal and the heatsink together.

It is strongly discouraged, in this case, to use heroic force and pull this matter upon yourself, or, as experience erroneously suggests, to pick something up! This can damage the crystal! There is a simpler and more elegant solution: we take a regular household hair dryer and slowly warm up the clutch area.

After a while (5-10 seconds), we begin to slightly shake the radiator from side to side, as in the photo above. Thermal paste, softening under the influence of temperature, will allow us to do this. Warming up this thing a little more, we can easily separate our radiator from the crystal:

Try as completely and as carefully as possible to clean both the "base" of the radiator and the crystal itself from the remnants of the old dried thermal paste. At the same time, try not to scratch the metal surface of the radiator (this will reduce its heat transfer coefficient). Do not scrape, it is better to warm up separately and wipe off the old paste.

With the crystal, it is also as careful as possible: if you did not manage to remove some part of the paste (like mine, for example), then it is better to leave it. Anything that is erased - be sure to delete! Otherwise, the thermal paste, under the influence of temperature, will, as they say, “bake” and then it will be very difficult to remove it without damaging (chipping) the core itself.

Before we start repairing a video card with our own hands, let's take a closer look at the graphics chip.

Why did I highlight some of the areas in the photo above? See, the larger area is the graphics card chip itself, and the smaller area is the GPU die (GPU - graphics processing unit). Along the perimeter of the crystal, we see a white sealant substance (compound), which performs several functions: it protects the crystal from dust getting under it and attaches it to the substrate.

What is the "trick" here and why repairing a video card with your own hands can end unsuccessfully, no matter what efforts we make? The area (array) of BGA solder balls is not only between the chip itself and the PCB textolite, but also between the crystal and the substrate graphics card!

Do you feel where I'm going? The harsh reality is that we can repair the video card ourselves (if we are still lucky) only if there is a violation of the ball contacts directly between the PCB and the substrate. If the “dump” occurred under the crystal, then we can hardly do anything about it. Even such an operation as reballing (complete replacement of an array of balls using a stencil) will not save in this case, since this procedure is performed only for the “bottom” of the entire chip, but not for the crystal!

So, I hope we have learned the necessary minimum of theory? Moving on! To repair a video card at home, we need a flux and a disposable syringe. I use the usual GFR (alcohol-canin), which is called “GFR-flux”.

We collect the substance in a syringe (about one cube). If it remains, it will be possible to drain back.

Note: You can use any other inactive (ideally neutral) flux. For example, "F1" or "F3". The original LTI-120 is also suitable. Although, with LTI, not everything is so simple: leave it as a last resort 🙂

We carefully apply the tip of the needle to the edge of the substrate, tilting it so that the flux we squeeze out of the syringe is under the chip. After pumping it, if necessary, tilt the card slightly so that it spreads well between the balls. Ideally, we want to achieve an effect where the liquid appears a little from all sides.

Advice: after use, rinse the syringe (just take several times of water from the tap and squeeze out through the needle). If this is not done, the rosin in the needle will dry out and clog it. It will take a long time to clean or throw away.

Now we can be sure that when heated, the flux will fulfill its function. Why fluxes are needed, what they are and how to use them correctly, we considered in a separate article, so we will not repeat ourselves.

After that, we can proceed directly to the repair of the video card with our own hands! To do this, we place it in such a way that we have free access to the GPU from above and below and, using a soldering station, we begin to heat the substrate around the perimeter.

Note: under no circumstances heat the crystal itself! It may fail!

How I do it, I'd better show you in video format, since you can't clearly illustrate here with photos alone.

Now let's comment on this video a little. When you warm up the video card from below (under the chip), try to keep the hair dryer perpendicular to the plane of the PCB, otherwise I didn't manage to shoot and warm it at the same time. Also, be careful not to flare the small card components located on the back side (they can be easily shifted, given the heated solder underneath).

In the video above, I did not show the whole procedure, as you understand. The bottom must be heated long enough (3-5 minutes) so that the smoke from the flux, which you may have noticed, began to rise quite intensively above the board (this is evidence that the board has warmed up well). The first stage will be “boiling” and bubbling of the flux - this is normal.

Also, do not hesitate to warm up the place under the crystal itself (you can do this through the board). The main thing: do not hold the hair dryer in one place - smoothly move it over the area (to exclude places of local overheating of the surface). Keep the funnel of the hair dryer at a distance of 2-3 centimeters from the surface to be treated. I personally set the air flow to an average value, the temperature that the soldering station shows at the same time is 420-450 degrees Celsius. The second value is the limit for my "Ya Xun 880D".

The temperature spread here is due to the fact that its sensor itself is located directly in the handle of the hot air gun, and the air temperature at the outlet of the hot air gun is already different (lower). Plus, here you can add the inevitable heat loss due to the ability to absorb and dissipate heat by the treated surface itself, the temperature in the room, the proximity of the hair dryer to the heated area, the power of the air flow, etc. That is why only empirically it will be possible to select the exact value of the operating temperature (thermal profile) for a particular soldering station.

To what state should you warm up? Here, again, there are indirect signs by which we can navigate. The whole procedure takes approximately 5-8 minutes. The spread of time is due to the factors listed above. It also depends on the quality of the flux used, the type of solder from which the BGA array is made on a substrate (lead or lead-free). In the process of strong heating, the flux should evaporate (smoke) fairly decently.

Also an important marker can be the visual detection of the melting of the solder on the elements located on the chip around the die (usually a series of small SMD capacitors). When the solder "shines" on them, it is a sure sign that the balls of the substrate have reached their melting point, which is exactly what we need! For greater confidence, you can take tweezers in your free hand and try to slightly move the chip itself: gently push it (literally by a millimeter) to the side and you will see how it “wobbles” and, due to the forces of surface tension of the molten balls from below, will snap into place. After that, the heating can be safely stopped!

Note: some craftsmen, instead of a station, use an ordinary building hair dryer or repair the video card with their own hands, “baking” it in a household oven, after wrapping it in foil! Frankly, I am not a fan of such radical methods of "repair", although (if the guys succeed in everything), then why not? 🙂

During the heating procedure, you can monitor the surface temperature with a thermocouple or pyrometer (infrared thermometer). This will help in the future to better navigate in the selection of the correct thermoprofile.

Note: when cooling the video card (and any other element), do not use forced airflow - fan, etc. Let the part cool naturally, no need to "fit" it. We don't need the microcircuit to receive a thermal shock (shock), do we?

This is how you repair a video card with your own hands! Whether they were successful or not, we have yet to verify. To do this, we need to do a few mandatory things. Out of habit, I clean (where possible) the board from the flux residues. In this case, it is the rosin remaining after the evaporation of the alcoholic component. The rosin is neutral (it does not interact with the components of the board) and, in theory, it is not necessary to wash it off, but, for the sake of order, let's go over it thoroughly with a brush and a cleaner.

We washed more or less (the rosin dissolved), let it dry and apply fresh thermal paste on the crystal (“KPT”, “AlSil” or “Zalman” - I respect):

Now we put the whole "constructor" back together (we fix the heatsink, screw on the cooler, connect it to the connector on the board).

Before installing the card into the system unit, let's go (just in case) with an elastic band over the pins of the Pci Express connector and that's it - can you install a component on the motherboard to check what we've got?

But it turned out, as we can see, everything is not even bad. There is an image on the monitor! Do-it-yourself video card repair is possible! Of course, to be completely sure, we need to install the operating system (it was not at hand), install the video card driver and, ideally, run some kind of stress test for stability, which will show us, in the end, we managed to repair the video card ourselves or No?

Note: The free and easy-to-use tool "FurMark" can work very well for this test.

Otherwise anything can happen: the video card seems to work, but the driver is not installed or does not pass the stability test. Also, as you understand, we cannot give any guarantee for this type of "repair" and we do not know how long the device will work? But, as they say, on the other hand, we “pumped over the skill” of repairing video cards at home, and the client received a temporary working computer. We did what we could, and then there will be what should happen!

As always, I am waiting for your comments, feedback, constructive criticism below under the article 🙂

DIY video card repair.

Hello friends. In today's topic, we will consider an issue that sooner or later interests every user who is not used to keeping an eye on the cleanliness and cooling system of his computer. The question sounds like this: how to repair a video card actually manually.

How to monitor the cleanliness of the system unit and avoid stupid problems with overheating of chips can be found in the article “Why the computer is warming up.

As practice shows, and I have had it for at least 5 years, about 90 percent of breakdowns are due to poor-quality cooling, which leads to overheating of the chips.

In video cards, the main element is the video chip, which is usually located under the heatsink. In the screenshot below, number 1 shows the video chip of the Msi rx2600pro video card, and under the second is the heatsink removed from the chip.

Now I will describe how I carried out the repair of this particular video card under the influence of heating the chip using a soldering hair dryer. The breakage of this element was caused by the "blade" of the video chip, which caused vertical artifacts to appear all over the screen.

Do not forget to subscribe to free updates and you will always be aware of interesting cases from my practice.

This is just one of the breakdowns that occur with video cards and it is the most common.

Malfunctions of video cards are as follows.

* When the device is turned on, the picture is not displayed on the screen.

* Appearance of all kinds of color distortion.

* POST "beeps" about a card initialization error.

* The appearance of vertical and / or horizontal "artifacts.

* All different picture display glitches under load on the chip.

* Braking of the picture during the game.

All of the above problems have different ways of solving, but in this article we will touch upon the "artifacts" that usually arise due to the "dump" of the chip itself or its memory.

By "dump" should be understood the process of breaking or burning out the contact inside the chip or from its "seat". A break may occur if the computer is dropped and hit. Burnout occurs mainly due to the operation of chips at elevated temperatures, which in turn is caused by negligence in monitoring the state of cooling. The contacts also burn out due to incorrect power supply.

I am touching on the topic of repairing a video card, because, as I have already mentioned, I recently carried out repairs of this type.

A man approached me with a request to fix the breakdown of his video card. The breakdown, he said, was the appearance of strange vertical stripes across the computer screen.

Having accepted the equipment for repair, I began to fix the problem, but for a more detailed analysis of this situation with the application of video filming of all stages of the repair, I turned to a friend in a way that second hands would not interfere with me. By the way, my friend is a phone repairman and I think that from his practice, we will take something useful for further articles.

Let's start to repair the video card, which I divided into six stages and to each of which I will attach a video file with the work done.

Stage one: “Disassembly and cleaning.

I hope you already know that the video chip of a video card usually has heatsinks with passive or active cooling. In the first stage, we remove the cooling system from the chip. To do this, unscrew the 4 radiator mounting bolts. After we remove it to the side. Having unscrewed the bolts, the radiator remains either on the thermal paste adhered to the chip or, in some cases, on the latches passing through the textolite of the video card. We carry out cleaning around our patient - the chip with a toothbrush, having previously moistened it with alcohol.

Stage two: “Removing the thermal paste.

As mentioned earlier, in the system, the role of heat sink and filling the void between the heatsink and the chip is performed by the applied thermal paste, which over time either burns out completely or partially sticks. At this stage, we remove it, both from the chip and from the heatsink itself. Remove the sticky paste with an alcohol-coated napkin. I have adapted to do this with a toothbrush. In general, friends, after doing the same work, you yourself will pick up a familiar cleaning product for yourself in the future. So, having eliminated the remnants of the paste, we proceed to the third stage.

Stage three: “Fixing the video card. Flux application.

When the "patient" is ready to warm up, you need to secure it comfortably. The fastening in this case was carried out using the holder, which can be seen in the video below. Having fixed the card, we apply flux with a stick around the video chip, it is also called "soldering fat". We apply the flux without regret; we will eliminate the residues after the end of the procedure.

Stage four: “Warming up with a Lukey B52D soldering hair dryer.

We put our soldering hair dryer on 300 degrees to warm up. In general, every owner of a soldering station should know how his hairdryer heats up, whether the temperature readings correspond to real ones. Ideally, of course, it is better to carry out the entire heating process with an infrared soldering station - under its heating, you can bring the chip to a "floating state" which is very convenient for shrinking it to its seat. In the absence of such a station, we will use the Lukey B52D soldering hair dryer. Gradually we begin to warm up the chip by running a hairdryer along its edges in the area where the flux is applied. Noticing the boiling of the flux, we "shrink" the chip to its place by pressing it, without stopping the heating process. In my case, pressing was done with tweezers. The whole warm-up process took us approximately three minutes. You can adjust the heating temperature yourself, the main thing is that the chip is brought to an almost floating state.

Stage five “We remove the remains of the flux and let it cool.

Having finished the work on "shrinking" the chip that we have warmed up to its place at the fifth stage, let the card cool down for a couple of minutes, and we can start to eliminate the remaining flux. If during the heating process you notice that somewhere there is no flux, then you can add it. But we add, without interrupting the process of repairing a video card with our own hands.

Stage six “Assembling the device.

The last, final stage of the video card repair, which was done by hand, has come. After warming up and shrinking the chip and removing excess flux, we can start installing the cooling system. By this time, I think your card has cooled down. Is not it? If not, then it's okay.

We take a high-quality thermal paste and apply it in an even layer on the video chip. Avoid getting the paste past the chip, and if you suddenly "missed" it is advisable to immediately remove it with paper or a rag. Install a radiator on top of the chip with the applied paste, fixing it with fixing screws.

All the guys. So we have learned how to repair a video card with our own hands when “artifacts appear.

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Hello everyone. I am often asked to write an article on the topic "Warming up a video card at home." In this article, we will look at the process of warming up a video card using a Lukey 702 hot air soldering station.

Soldering station Lukey 702 is a budget option. So if you are fond of soldering, I advise you to purchase it.

Lukey 702 is great for home soldering and fully meets all expectations (something carried me into the wrong steppe). Let's better introduce our guinea pig - the GIGABYTE GeForce 8500 GT graphics card.

Due to the lack of active cooling on this video card, there is nothing surprising in its breakdown. Usually problems with a video chip or memory are associated with overheating, which leads to a breakdown of the contacts between the chip and the board. Stripes on the monitor screen (ripples) are an indicator of such a breakdown.

Attention! Do not under any circumstances press the video chip to the board. This in 100% of cases leads to the sudden death of the video card. No need to listen to the advice of different "miracle masters" on the forums. In this way, you will put an end to your video card once and for all. Pressing the video chip leads to the destruction of the BGA balls (chip contacts) and will contribute to the bending of the board. After such a procedure, even a repair at a professional infrared soldering station will not help. So be smart - use my advice or give your graphics card to a professional.

Basically, there are many ways to warm up a video card at home. This is roasting in the oven and heating with a building hairdryer. Perhaps, after these procedures, the video card will work for some time, but while using these methods there is a great risk of ditching your video card irrevocably.

Now let me explain what the point of warming up the video card is.

As I said above, when the video card overheats, the contact between the chip and the board is broken. When warming up, the BGA balls (chip contacts) melt, and as a result, the video chip seems to sit in place. As a result, contact is restored between the chip and the board.

To be honest to the end, the method of warming up the video card does not always give the expected result.With each video card, everything is individual: there are those that work for several years after warming up, and there are those that break the next day. If the video card breaks down again after a while after it has already warmed up once, there is no point in doing it a second time. In this case, it's time for the video card to retire.

The best way to repair a video card is to reball on a professional infrared soldering station. The reballing procedure consists in completely removing the chip from the board, removing old balls and planting the chip on new BGA balls. This method allows not just to temporarily restore contacts, but to re-plant the chip with conditions close to the factory ones.

Something I went headlong into theory. Although, I think, it will not hurt anyone to know the basic concepts before doing the warming up of the video card.

Let's get down to the warm-up procedure. To do this, we need: a video card with a defect, a soldering station, a flux, thermal paste, alcohol to wash off flux residues and straight hands

As for the flux, I want to say only one thing - it is best to use a no-clean BGA flux. After the usual fluxes, oxide often begins to appear on the contacts. Many experts advise using FluxPlus flux.

Let's move on to the very process of warming up.

First, carefully remove the heatsink from the video card. Next, remove the remaining thermal paste from the video chip and proceed to the process of applying the flux.

The flux is applied to the edges of the chip. You shouldn't regret it, but you don't need to overdo it, because after the end of the warm-up, we will have to wash it off the board.

Next, turn on the soldering station. We set the temperature to 450 degrees (at non-Chinese soldering stations this temperature is about 250-300 degrees), the average air flow and we begin to warm up the lower part of the board under the chip. This should be done for about 6-8 minutes, while driving the hot air gun in circular motions at a distance of 2-3 cm from the board. We do this so that when the chip heats up from above, the board is not led (not crumpled) from the hot air directed only from above. The temperatures above and below must be equalized. When the board heats up, the flux will begin to melt and fill the cavity under the board, which will facilitate good melting of the BGA balls and restore contact between the board and the chip.

Next, we start heating the chip from above, following the same conditions as when heating the bottom. We wait for the boiling flux and heat for another 6-8 minutes.

During this procedure, the BGA balls will begin to melt, as a result of which contacts between the chip and the board will be restored.

Everything. After warming up, let the board cool down. Cooling time is approximately 20 minutes.

We wash off the remnants of the flux from the board with a soft cotton pad or cotton swabs soaked in alcohol. Then we apply thermal paste to the video chip. Then we put back the radiator, install the video card into the computer and enjoy the working video card.

This completes the warming up of the video card.

I will repeat once again - warming up the video card is not a panacea for the problem. If the video card is broken, it means that it will not live long. After warming up, video cards work differently for everyone, whoever is as lucky. But, despite this, thanks to this procedure, you have time to save up for a new video card.

Visual artifacts are called out of nowhere stripes and nodules on the screen, cubic blotches that break the integrity of the picture and other defects. The appearance of such artifacts may be due to the presence of a malfunction in the graphics substation of the computer. In such situations, it may be necessary to repair the video card.

It is sometimes quite difficult to do this on your own. But sometimes, as practice shows, performing such a procedure can be quite useful. In the process of repairing a video card, much of what was previously incomprehensible to the user becomes clear.So, if you want to understand all the intricacies of video card recovery, you definitely need to familiarize yourself with the information presented in this review.

Before embarking on an incredible project called "DIY Video Card Repair", you need to figure out the cause of the breakdown. Most likely, the reader will not be surprised by the fact that any malfunction of computer equipment can refer either to the hardware or software part of the computing device. In this case, we will consider the first type of breakdown. Advanced users also call this action "digging for hardware". Let's get down to this procedure.

From simple to complex

The user's worries about the cardinally changing image on the monitor screen in certain situations can be completely in vain. Does this surprise you? In addition, repairing a video card with your own hands, of course, can involve fairly simple manipulations. You just need to be attentive and you will succeed.

If the computer you are using has a discrete graphics adapter installed, then the "iron problem" could very likely appear as a result of dust pollution. To eliminate this problem, you need to turn off the device and remove the video card from the motherboard slot. You can use an alcohol solution or a regular eraser to clean the contact pad of the video card module. As you can see, everything is pretty simple.

If the BIOS does not recognize the installed graphics adapter, then first of all it is necessary to perform this kind of maintenance only if there is no positive result. After that, you should proceed to further operations.

Repair of video cards from Asus and other manufacturers

It would probably be correct to start with the fact that malfunctions in the operation of graphic systems are often associated with improper functioning of the cooling system. As a result of such a malfunction, the GPU microprocessor and other components of the video card may be exposed to critical temperatures. It is for this reason that a game scenario that unfolds at the onset of a climax can turn into a jerky simulator. This situation can be corrected as follows.

First of all, you need to dismantle the video card from the computer case. The cooler and the radiator grille located next to it must be cleaned of dust deposits. In some cases, the axis of rotation can be lubricated with ordinary machine oil or special silicone. If all of the above does not allow you to achieve the desired effect, you can try to replace the cooling element, namely the cooler.

Integrated graphics: hot solutions

As you know, the prices for discrete-type graphic substations can sometimes alienate ordinary users due to their high cost. This is especially true when it comes to gaming video cards. When buying a computing device, a novice user, as a rule, relies on the capabilities of his personal computer. But in such cases, when the integrated microprocessor GPU is operating, there may be troubles associated with the heating of the device.

It should be noted that the procedure described for restoring the thermal mode of a discrete video adapter can only partially be applied to the built-in graphics engines. This is due to the fact that the cooling system of integrated GPUs does not have a mechanical element - a cooler designed to remove heat. Therefore, the order of actions that must be performed to restore the functionality of the integrated video card will be somewhat different. However, despite this, it can be used for independent graphics modules.

Warranty inconvenience

If you decide to repair a video card from NVIDIA on your own, then it's time to think about the expediency of this procedure. If the warranty provided by the manufacturer has not yet lost its relevance, then it would be wiser to take the device to one of the service centers for servicing the products of this manufacturer. If you are completely confident in your own abilities or you have no other way to return the GPU processor to work, then you can try to apply the recommendations below in practice.

Replacing the Thermal Paste Layer

Thermal paste is a special substance that is applied to a GPU microchip in order to increase the level of heat transfer between contacting elements of the cooling system, such as a radiator-microcircuit. When carrying out a comprehensive repair of video cards from the manufacturer Asus or a graphics chip from any other manufacturer, the specialist will definitely replace the layer of thermal paste. The process of applying this substance is quite simple. You can see for yourself. First, you need to carefully remove the cooling system elements from the graphics adapter board. After that, with a clean cloth, you need to wipe off the remnants of the hardened substance from the radiator side adjacent to the microcircuit, as well as from the GPU microcircuit itself. After that, on both planes it is necessary to apply a thin even layer of thermal paste. You can then reverse-mount the graphics module.

Rebuilding Portable GPU Modules

For video cards used in laptops, the repair procedure will be exactly the same as for stationary computers. To restore the laptop's graphics adapter to work, you need to follow the same sequence of steps. However, due to some technological features of laptops, for certain models, access to the video card can be very difficult. And if you take into account that in such extremely cramped circumstances the user will have to perform technical maintenance of two graphics adapters, then this lesson turns into a rather laborious process.

It will be extremely difficult for a beginner to cope with this task. It would be better to entrust this operation to professionals. Things are quite different if the user can independently get full access to the video card and cooling system. In this case, the user has every chance of successfully completing the repair of the video card.

Overheating GPU

Let's try to fix the hottest problem that can arise with a video card with our own hands. This is GPU overheating. After exposure to critical temperatures, it is quite possible to repair the GPU with your own hands. However, one should not trust too much the advice of various experimenters, who unanimously assert that household appliances such as an oven or an iron can easily be used as a technical device designed to restore "floated BGA balls".

We hasten to assure you that if one of the soldering points of the GPU processor has moved away, then painlessly it will be possible to restore contact only with the help of specialized equipment, or, more precisely, a soldering station. Sometimes an industrial hair dryer or a hot air gun can be used as an alternative. However, in this case, you need to remember about some microelectronic nuances. So how can you repair your video card at home?

The gun should be equipped with an adjustable discharge temperature indicator. All plastic parts such as the cooler, latches and fixing elements must be removed from the video adapter board. It is necessary to prepare a piece of foil in advance, in which it is necessary to cut out a window corresponding in size to the size of the GPU chip. The rest of the graphics adapter area should be covered with this material for protection. The video card must be fixed on a flat surface that is not afraid of exposure to high temperatures.

Now on the thermo gun you need to set the temperature to 150 degrees and warm up the surface of the graphics module for 3-5 minutes. After that, you need to move the hair dryer regulator to the 300 degree position. Using a pre-prepared foil template, it is necessary to warm up the graphics chip for a couple of minutes. Now all that remains is to wait until the video card has completely cooled down and check the performance of the visual effects module. In most cases, video cards last a long time after repair. After this procedure, be sure to inspect the graphics card for punctured or swollen capacitors. These are definitely subject to replacement.

Now you know how you can restore the performance of your video card. In the case of a successful technological service, the prices for repairs will now scare you. Although, to be completely honest, it is better to repair an expensive video card in a specialized service.

This entry was posted in Repair on October 17, 2015 by katrinas11. Thank me, share the link with your friends on social networks: