Revived Video Card!

[comtec]

Hey guys,
Some of you may remember years ago when i baked the 02 headlights to get them apart, i have been at it again :smile:

I have a high end laptop that i had custom built 2 years ago and the video card (HD 6990M) recently died. The LCD on the laptop was completely gone, i could use the HDMI out to a external monitor but only in VGA mode with the AMD drivers removed. I really like the laptop and it's still in excellent shape so i started looking for a replacement card but the only ones available to fit the laptop were old models from $460 to $975 that are less powerful then the card the pc came with.

Over time the continued heating up and cooling down of a circuit board can cause fractures in the solder connections of the pins they connect. I thought this may be the problem and the card would be going to the trash anyway so i re-flowed the solder on the board. The idea here is to get the solder hot enough to melt so any break in the connection is re-soldered. I removed the video card from the laptop and placed it in a preheated oven at about 385 degrees for 10 minutes. Removed the card, allowed it to cool down and re-installed it in the computer. To my surprise it works perfect again in all it's 1080P glory.

Thought i would share.
Cheers
Mike

 

[robr]

Damn! Nice one. I haven't run into a dead video card on a laptop before, usually it's a dead back light

 

[Hard Five]

Same technique is used to fix some of the crappy Bluetooth modules Acura used around in the in the mid-2000's.

Though it doesn't involve an oven, the famous fix for Xbox 360's red ring of death was to wrap them in a towel, which was essentially doing the same thing. The trapped heat from the towel cooked the xbox until the crappy soldier melted and self-fixed the hairline cracks.

 

[comtec]

Yeah it's my first one too but also the first replaceable discrete video card i have had in a laptop, the others i had were on board graphics. When i searched online it seems the HD 6990 had a lot of failures along with some other top mobile cards from both manufacturers. My guess is the high power cards in laptops build lots of heat which account for most failures. I game on the pc so when i bought the laptop i got the fastest mobile video card out at that time.


Funny you mention the 360 because i got the idea from seeing where people baked their box.

Mike

 

[Teej]

Disappointed... I was waiting for the video card headlight integration sentence and it never came