Just stumbled across the miracle of baking (literally!) your dead GPU to revive it, and how it may actually work! http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=606658 http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1421792 Any gurus have experience actually doing that? I wish I heard about this when I lost my 280s . I got rid of them a while back thinking they had no chance in hell of coming back! In theory it makes sense how this works... but wow!
Yep it "can" work. But only do it as a last resort procedure, if you have no warranty or exhausted all possibilities etc. Basicly it re-solders the board, like they do when they solder the components to the PCB at the factory, and in some cases, not all, the solder connections are simply just bad.
Yea it works - brought my GTX back from the dead, but I had run outta ideas by then. Not guaranteed though.
Yes. I resurrected one of my 8800 GTS's with this. I had no warranty and I had blue lines down the screen on boot up. So one of the memory chips had either died or had a bad solder joint. Remove all the plastic parts. Roll 4 balls of tin foil. Get a baking tray and cover it in foil. place the four balls on the baking tray and then place the naked card on top. I tried to avoid having the foil balls touching any of the components. Bake for 20 minutes at 200 - 220 oC or gas mark 7. Once baked remove carefully from the oven and allow to cool before serving on a bed of CPU with a sprinkle of RAM.
20 minutes is way too long time. 8-10 minutes at 180C. Or, alternative method is to use hot air blower and do about ten quick sweeps across the pcb.
Wow, where have I been? I step away from Guru3d for a few months and come back only to find out people are baking their GPUs :O Pretty neat stuff, really.
^ Lol it only works for a short time, normally just long enough to copy data off the drive. It's used for overheat failures which are usually mechanical..... Well there's a lot of guys around here that like frying hardware, so I guess it's only natural they try baking it as well.
I had what was likely an overheat failure. It could only read from, no longer be written to so I copied the data off of it. Like a month later I decided to pop it back and to see if I could figure anything out and it was magically working again. I can't imagine how it was overheating, it had great airflow, but whatever. It's been several months, at least 5 months, since then. Stupid Caviar Blue, that's what I get for buying one, even if it was many years ago. As for the soldering on cards screwing up, how is that even possible?
As for the soldering on cards screwing up, how is that even possible?[/QUOTE] Metal fatigue from heat expansion then contraction when cooling down. Probably loosens the softer solder from the harder metal contacts. Ive met folks who say they never shut down their PCs so the hardware stays at operating temp but I dont know if there is really any truth in it especially if one upgrades every other yr. or sooner. Sounds like a big waste of electrical energy to me come billing time ea. month.
Yes it is working for the most Users. It works on my GTX280 as well. btw. theres a topic allready http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=313769