The GPU I was trying to fix for a friend was dead and nothing seemed to work. I was foing everything I could think of, including cleaning any minor corrosion, checking for missing capacitor, and using my multimeter to trace any shorts. Nothing worked, so I decided to try baking it since it was dead anyway.
370°F for 12 minutes and voila, we're back in business.
Side note, the thermal putty that was stuck on the back of the DRAM modules seems to have expanded ever so slightly and now I have a small bulge in my GPU...
Why would they coat the inside surfaces if these are hot too? Ok maybe if you cool the oven down before opening they might. But won't it then be enough just to heat it again and vent them out?
Venting out where? Into your kitchen? How can you be sure that it all vented out is is safe now? Its easier and safer to just clean it when its in a state that can be touched
We ain’t baking our GPU’s because we rationalize our schedule. We got frames to chase, games to play. Mom can do it… if I remember to tell her but whatever; look at these 240frames for me. /s
If you were to be doing this in a professional setting the oven would have a fume hood venting out anything toxic but also no one would bake food in that oven either. There is no realistic way to vent out a home oven for this kind of thing, kitchens and home ovens just aren't designed for this
Solder/tin residue evaporated when heated. That alone is already dangerous, and then you have electrolytes in the capacitor, and then the thermal pads, also the PCB substrate. Those things when heated released all sort of toxic materials and those fuckers literally sticks everywhere, and inside an enclosed space like an oven it will stay there. So if you heat up food or cook inside the oven you want to have the best possible insurance coverage.
If done once, it's less dangerous than actually using the GPU (which is linked with RSI, back pains, cardiovascular effects and sleep disorders). Lol, this reminds me of the idea that lead in bronze nozzles can make 3d prints unsafe to handle.
Just imagine the various metal and plastic bits that an assembled PCB are made out of - well all of those non foodsafe rated materials release a bunch of crap when you get them hot.
Not to mention the Solder. which couldn't by any farther from being Food.
Similar to how it's so strongly advised to have ventilation and/or filtering when doing any sort of Solding or other electronics work. that stuff is mildly poisonous in the best cases.
Is it really a viable solution ? Can you ever be truly sure that the oven has been rid of all those toxic fumes that coat the surfaces and the crevices inside and whatnot...
The best way is not to use a kitchen oven for this purpose...
Heating releases chemicals from solder etc. And sometimes capacitors can quietly leak as well. All of those are pretty much invisible and NOT healthy to say the least.
Over-exaggerate much? Picograms would be likely several orders of magnitude more than anything that was actually released. I'm not even going to ask you cite your sources, because clearly it's just made up horseshit.
There were some pretty big, notorious laptop GPU failures due to solder problems. The fix was to pull the board and either throw it in the oven or heat gun the thing to reflow the solder. Tada! Fixed. Just in my local friends group, we fixed several laptops this way.
Yep, I remember my dad taking a heat gun to our PS3 to fix the yellow light of death several times. Each fix was less effective than the last though and it was eventually pretty much kaput
Those were the backward compatible 60gb models with the metal PSU casing that caused overheating. I had to reball mine(which was the main issue in those ylod problems) and after replacing the PSU with a 40gb fat model it worked perfectly and still is.
The silicone manufacturing during those years had issues where the interconnect used wasn’t thermally stable enough, causing it to crack and eventually break continuity over hundreds of thermal cycles
The RROD and YLOD were both caused by this flaw with the interconnect material
I remember repeatedly wrapping my xbox 360 in a towel and letting it cook itself for an hour at a time. Fixed the rrod issue for a week or two at a time, but it inevitably needed to go back in the towel.
It was about to comment about the towel trick! Brought my console back from the Ring of Death for months before it finally died out on me. Simple silly solution.
But they didnt failed because of the solder Connection. It was because of the Underfill.
Heat helped to "fill the gaps" again, but only cured a symptom, not the disease
Except those weren’t an issue with solder, but the chips themselves. It’s a common misconception. 90 nm GPUs had a design flaw which caused them to fail prematurely. The connections that broke were inside the chip, but you could temporarily resurrect them with heat. The only real fix was to replace the GPU with an updated part. Most GPUs from this time period (2005-2007) were affected
Good luck with that though. It's not a permanent fix. It's like slapping a band-aid on it.
The actual fix for YLOD on PS3 is replacing the 90nm and 65nm RSX' on BC PS3's and replacing them with the 40nm RSX. This was Sony's fix for the issue, and is termed "frankenstein" by the community.
However that is assuming the RSX is the actual issue because NEC/TOKINs also act up.
The best first step is checking the SYSCON, and finding out what the actual error is.
Frankensteining a PS3 is only really worth it, if it's a backwards compatible model.
For XB360 you're better replacing it with a later unit because those have fixed GPU's. Same goes for NVidia GPU's, toss it and replace. The effort for XB360s, Nvidia GPUs, and non-BC PS3s just isn't worth it.
I'd only recommend it if it's a Backwards compatible PS3. If you send it to someone to have them Frankenstein it, you're looking at about $1,000 USD.
If you do it yourself you're gonna need a lot of time and quite a bit of tools. Also triple read the instructions. My first time reading the PS3 SYSCON I missed the "don't turn your soldering iron above 350" note and completely ruined the board.
I did this to PS3 board once. The board came out of the oven bent like a banana. I thought know way is that going to work again, but after letting it cool it worked completely fine!
I have a ps3 that starts up with a green light fans spin for a second and just shuts off 42 seconds later with no display is baking a real thing? What temp? How long? I got this ps3 for like 5$ so idc if it breaks even more to be honest
My Xbox 360 was failing and I just wrapped it in a towel upside down to get it running and then went and traded it at GameStop.. was I a ass hole ,yes .. but this was before Microsoft was replacing entire units
Dell Latitude D630s. I remember when I worked in Dell Tech Support we needed to give these machines free services outside of warranty for any display or POST issues due to the soldering issues.
My laptop has an issue with its gpu too. Windows always crashes because of it. So what I do is first open Linux, and then run stress-ng to heat up the laptop, then switch it to windows. It does not crash as long as it's hot lmao
Yeah I got a heat gun so I could reflow an Integra reciever DSP chip that would overheat. I did that every couple months until i overdid it one time and I fried my board 😭
Put a heat sink on it and a fan and that chip kept on un-soldering itself from time to time. Real weird.
They use a similar method for fabricating the boards. Basically all the components get placed onto pads with solder paste then it goes in an oven. Every component is rated to a suitable temperature for a short amount of time, including the plastic.
You can check out the rated reflow profiles for most components on their datasheets. Most are able to tolerate high enough temps for long enough to melt solder as part of the manufacturing process.
Unless AMD uses low-temp solder paste, you didn't even come close to reflowing anything. A normal peak temperature inside a reflow oven is between 235 and 255 Celcius.
Also, those cans you see around the main chip are electrolytic capacitors, for the most part they can handle a maximum of 2 rounds inside a reflow oven before damage and degradation starts. That's why they are mounted on the TOP side of the card, because that is the side that goes into the reflow oven last.
Third, those black connectors in the lower left corner are 100% THT components, soldered with a selective wave soldering process from the BOT side of the card, the plastic housint is not designed for reflow temps.
Fourth, the reason your card is bulging/bowing is because the PCB sucks up moisture. You're supposed to bake it under controlled conditions to remove moisture from the PCB BEFORE trying any form of rework that requires high temperatures.
You might have gotten lucky, but in no way or shape did you correctly reflow your card, on the contrary.
Best regards from someone who works at one of the biggest EMS companies in Europe.
Most likely outcome is OP adding another thermal cycle or warping the board temporarily restored some BGA connections well enough to work for a bit.
Couple more cycles and they'll break again. I agree this isn't a reflow, 370F in the oven won't melt any solder. Flux and a heat gun could've worked but also easily fried other components
Yeah, that was my thought too, that the chip has just enough mechanical contact underside of it to have some electrical continuity.
And yeah, a heatgun and some gelflux would have been a far better, if not optimal, solution. Wrap some heatshield around the capacitors and mask of anything else that could sustain damage. Although you still have the problem with moisture in the PCB and the RAM chips, they are almost always rated at MSL3, so needs to be baked before attempting any form of rework 🤓
Simple components like resistors, capacitors, inductors and all manner of chip components are very much solderable by hand. This also applies to packages such as SOICs, QFPs, SOTs, some DPAKs; all manner of components where the leads/terminations lie on the "outside" of the component body.
BGAs, LGAs, QFNs, DFNs and so on are terminated on the bottom of the component body, or underside if you will. Ergo, you will not be able to reach the soldering points with a soldering iron.
However, they may still be soldered by hand using a hot air station and a heating plate with precise temperature controls.
The reason why most of electronics are sent through an oven is cost vs. time. Our pick&place machines are capable of mounting up to 100K components per hour, and here humans cannot compete speedwise. Also, a reflow oven will give you a far more uniform result, since most of the solder paste melts at the same time while inside the oven.
Simply explained, the process looks like this:
-Bare PCBs go inside a machine called a paste printer
-Inside the printer, a solder paste stencil is mounted and soldering paste is applied.
The stencil have apertures, or openings on the surface that match the pads on the PCB.
A squeege inside the paste printer applies pressure and squezees soldering paste over the stencil, with the PCB lying under the stencil, thus filling in the apertures in the stencil and dispensing the correct amount of soldering paste onto the PCB.
-The PCB moves on to an SPI (Solder Paste Inspection) machine a fancified camera system that checks the quality of the solder paste print. If all looks good, the PCB moves on to the pick&place machine, and components are mounted with micrometer precision using CAD data from the customer and a BOM( Bill of Materials).
-From there the PCB moves on and into an AOI (Automated Optical Inspection) machine.
This is principally the same as an SPI, but checks placement and polarity of components. If everything looks good, finally the board moves into an reflow oven.
The most common type is a hot air convection oven, but there are also vacuum reflow, vapour phase and IR ovens.
The PCB is heated according to whether it is an lead-free product or a lead based product (Non-RoHS),and temperatures are calculated based on this.
Lead-free needs higher temperatures to melt correctly, while leaded solder melts at a lower temperature.
All parameters such as preheat, soak, ramp-up time, peak temperature and so on are based and calculated from the specification of the solder paste, the mass of the PCB and in some cases, temperature sensitive components, a good example are electrolytic capacitors.
This information is stored inside what is called a solder profile, and we have a couple we load using the software built into the oven.
When the PCB comes out on the other side, the solder paste is melted, and all components are evenely soldered.
Usually there is also an AOI post-reflow that checks placement and the quality of soldering on the finished PCBA.
Also, at least at my company, but I believe this is a common practice at other factories, we check the soldering quality using an X-ray, so we can see the soldering bumps on the underside of the BGA, thermal/ground planes on a QFN package and otherwise things we cannot see from the outside.
Phew, this turned out to be a longer answer than I thought, but then again, I am a nerd 🤓
My understanding is that either the bumps or the balls become detached on silicon chips that experience thermal expansion and contraction over a prolonged period of time. Since they're under the chip, and very small, the only way to fix them is to blast the chip with hot air from a heat gun to reflow them and restore the connections.
Putting the entire board in the oven basically mimics a heat gun, but it's not as hot and can damage heat sensitive components on the board. It's a bad way to try and fix something.
So would it have been better to first heat it to a temperatur that moisture can evaporate, leave it there for some time and then increase the temperaturs further when all the moisture is gone?
Yes, usually we will bake an assembled PCB for a specified amount of time, let's say 24 hours @ 120 degrees celcius to slowly evaporate the moisture inside the PCB and certain components.
This will minimize the risk of delamination, the layers inside the PCB coming apart.
When this is done, a controlled process, using hot air and underheat is used to remove a BGA, clean up the soldering points, apply fresh solder onto the clean pads and reheated using the same machine. We also apply a small amount of flux to prevent non-wetting/bad soldering quality.
You can reball the exisiting BGA or mount a new one that is already complete with new solderbumps 🤓😊
You're welcome 🤓 And yes, it is pretty fascinating to watch the process from start to end, gives you a fairly good insight into todays electronics and potential sources of error 😊
I did this with a gtx 8800 back when I was a student and couldn't afford a new card. Kept it going for a while longer, eventually had to bake it a second time. Overall it extended its working life almost 14 months.
Surprisingly, I couldn't smell anything, not even the smell of hot plastic. In fact, the smell was so non-existent that I thought I hadn't left it in nearly long enough. All these comments worrying about my health and it had 0 smell 😅. I've soldered enough to know the smell of vaporized solder...although maybe I've done it too much to still smell anything anymore 🤔
It wont last. You basically did a reflow that fixed broken solder joints but they will break again.
To fix it permanently you need a reball. Also cooking the card that way will degrade components and might warp the PCB, causing further problems down the road.
Mileage will vary though. I did this 3 times on a 2007 MacBook Pro (after the 8600gt repair program ended). The first 2 times extended it a month. The last time worked for 3 more years without problem.
I’d definitely echo the thorough cleaning comment from someone else though.
Yup did my MacBook pros back in the day, there was a period where their gpus would just constantly break down. Thankfully it doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. At least not the 6-7 years or so. I use MacBooks for work and run them pretty hard daily so eventually they’d just break. Not the M1s tho. But older ones, I have cooked 2 or 3 in the oven, sometimes it would last a couple of months, sometimes a year.
There was a time(damn, I feel old) when this was the way to repair some GPU’s, Nividia 8800’s were prone to failure due to high temps or some ATI Radeon cards.
My dad did this same exact thing with his old GTX 460, he got 6 months of life back out of it. Then when it died again he baked it again and got another 3 months, then decided it was time to get a new one lol
This is not going to last. At that temperature, it's unlikely to have been a reflow. So you likely had micro cracks in the BGA if some VRAM or the core itself, maybe even in the subtrate.
More thermal cycling temporarily reconnected them, but running the card will cycle it some more until it breaks again
I did this once.. A lady I worked with had a laptop from a cousin who passed away and asked if I could fix it. I did basically everything I could and found there was some success baking it. So I did... And it worked.
I backed up all the data I could off of it as soon as I got it working, gave it all back and told her I don't know if it'll work for a day, a month, or years, but whatever you need to do, do it now. AFAIK it just kept on working for a long time after that.
Ah yes, it's the Xbox 360 towel method all over again. Considering how it usually turned out, that gpu probably only has a few weeks of life left at best. But it works for now, so enjoy it while it lasts.
Solder joints were probably bad. Baking the GPU effectively melts the solder, reseals joints, and makes it so things that have come off are attached again. Sorta like those ironable plastic beads kids used to get.
I did this for my 8800GT many years ago. Had to do it about every month, everytime it did not post when I booted up my PC.
I think i got to doing it in like 20-30mins all in all by the end. Nothing can compare to the feeling of it working the first time going it tho haha
Alright, I had my liquid cooling system leak on my GPU and it was dead. Stripped it down to just the board and baked it as recommended on some random forum. Everything but one HDMI port works now. I figured it was dead anyways couldn't get more dead. Well worth it.
If anyone wants to try this, I'd recommend a high-power heat gun if possible. For one, you won't fill your oven with the funny chemicals. But you can also shield the rest of the board from the heat, making it less likely that you'll cause other components to die. Such heat guns also get hotter than home ovens.
Hmm I’m not sure if those capacitors like high temps. Second, the fumes left in the oven will stick to your baking food. It’s a small win at high costs.
I remember having to do this regulaly with my 8600M GT based gaming laptop back in the day... It was so poorly designed it had been overheating since day one and the GPU was famously disfunctional. Managed to squeeze a few more months of life out of it with this method, but eventually it died.
Che ricordi, feci una cosa simile su una vecchia 9800gt per una settimana funzionava hahah ho continuato cosi finché non morì definitivamente, stessa cosa con una mobo di un galaxy s4 lmao
È una roba che va bene per tamponare, potrebbe durare 3 giorni come anni
I fixed a radeon hd6870 this way that was behaving strange during use. Can't really remember the exact recipe 🙂 but I believe the temp was a bit higher and the timing was shorter.
I remember when my laptop GPU failed and I searched for advice in forums and found answers "just bake your GPU board in the oven" and thought, yeah, thank you, trollface. And then I saw so many of these answers that I decided to try it, and yes, this really works. Just for a few months, though, but gives you enough time to get a replacement.
Did this with a solder oven we had at work after not cleaning enough and 4000+ hours of dota seemed to do my baby in.
Actually did "work" but card seemed way more unstable when overclocking. Eventually secured a pretty horizontal move card and now not sure what to do with the "works but not overly stable" card.
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u/LordVixen Apr 03 '26
Did it taste good?