My iron is a 35W model. It came with one of those repair/service kits that include computer tools, that your family gets you for a birthday or holiday. I'm not sure if its any good or not, I wouldn't know... But the sucker gets hot on the handle part, so in between trying not to touch the hot end of the iron, I'm also constantly shifting my fingers on the handle so I'm not burning the same finger all the time. I may buy another iron just so I have another reference point... And I may buy some solder, as the stuff I have I have no idea what it is. It also came in the kit. It doesn't melt reliably it seems - sometimes it will melt in a couple seconds, other times it takes 15s. The whole process seems unpredictable, and hard to manage. I feel like its harder than it should be.
I couldn't really tin the tip of the iron. I could melt some solder with the tip, but none of the solder would stick to the tip. So I heated up the pad, toasted some surrounding PCB a bit, put a dab of solder on there, heated the wire a bit, put the wire on there, melted the solder on the wire together with the dab on the pad... Definitely not an application that would work for a small surface, but fortunately this fix has an area the size of a landing pad so I guess I got it done.
Anyways though, it got done, and the card runs. I also bought a glue gun so I could secure things to the board better, so that will come in handy in the future also. Going to paint up this card today, and hopefully run it soon. I have ran a 4890 before, which had no cold bug and was just really enjoyable to run... If this card is half as good as the 4890, I'll be a very happy boy.