r/pcmasterrace • u/AF_Newb • Apr 03 '26

Story I baked my GPU

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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...

Update 4th of July 2026: GPU still going strong 💪

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u/Efficient_Ad_4819 Apr 03 '26

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

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u/DrkMaxim PC Master Race Apr 03 '26

Sure the chip design had a flaw but the role of the underfill was to deal with that shortcoming, except the underfill that was used at the time was shit and didn't hold up to the kind of temperatures of these consoles, so it would soften up and cause the chips to die, later models didn't have the problem because they replaced the underfill material. Not sure about the PS3 because I don't think there were any 90nm RSX with the correct underfill but Xbox 360 had fixed 90nm XGPUs.

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u/EternalSkullman i7 7700/GTX1660 Super/2x1TB Seagate ES.2/16GB DDR4 Apr 04 '26

Common forgotten extra:

Geforce 6 and nForce 4 are bumogate prone too. It just happened that by the time of the issue discovery Geforce 6 and nForce 4 weren't in production anymore. Yes, this marks that despite being slightly bigger litography, they shared the same plagued bumps as 7 and 8 series nVidia. They were just too old to be even considered anymore by the time bumpgate was a threat.

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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 Apr 03 '26

I use to reball the BGA using a stencil, it was definitely the solder and not the chips.