Steady hand saves a small brain, Emergency Solder questions ASAP!

OK, I am officially the biggest idiot in this forum. Just today I Artic Silver EPOXY'ed four heatsinks laying around at work to my week-old Chaintech ti4200. Well for fun I thought I'd set a fan on top of the heatsinks, unmounted, to the heatsinks. Well I went to see how hot things were inside the case and I knocked the fan off the heatsinks and the blade of the fan sliced through a solder pt on the video card causing the broken solder to burn a terrible glowing red on top of one of the black thingie (see pic)... oh did I mention the dreaded smell of fried electronics? at this point I paniced and pulled the plug and quickly realized I was an epoxy job away from RMAing the card... time to think

Unsure whether to cry, panic, scream or shoot myself I decided to stay calm and figure out what destruction was done. I found the solder pt that was destroyed, scraped off the soot that was the old solder pt, plugged in the good ole solder gun, and went to work with solder and a wire (see pic).

To my utter suprise (one tradgic miracle outbalancing another) the card fired back up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

yeah so god and I have this love/hate relationship going right now...

<sigh> disaster averted....

***my question how will the solder hold up? Its .050 dia radio shack solder. Will it melt and fall off? What is the mp of solder and should I worry about the card getting hot enough for the solder to fall off and possibly fry the card for real?

here is the hail-mary solder job I did... holy cow I can't believe it worked!!!

should hold fine, dont see why not
gj on the repair, thats amazing it still works

think it was instinct that saved me, that overclockers "OH **** I DID SOMETHING BAD HEAD FOR THE POWER CABLE IN THE BACK OF THE COMPUTER AND SORT IT OUT LATER" instinct...

forget a cat, "reflexes like an overclocker"

Whew! Close shave there....way too close!

Congrats on saving the card, and you may have good luck with it: I have done a couple repair jobs: ide controller back in the 486 days: thing lasted about 5 years with a couple of wires replacing pcb traces

On the other hand, it may not do well: I have a vp6 that somehow burned a trace out, and while I was able to repair it with wire and my trusty soldering iron, it hasn't been quite the same: worked a while, then flaked out. It took a few months off, worked a while, and flaked out again so I am now replacing it.

Two methods to go with: take it easy on it (no vid card ocing)and hope it lasts or push it as hard as you can: either it breaks or it will last forever!

well, kinda said screw it (the card is only meant to be a cheap $130 solution to hold me over till the nv30 [replaced my old tnt2 ultra]) and am OCing the crap out of it... The new RAMsinks are working wonderful, card is stable, just ran return to castle wolf for like an hour at 300core/609mem and all is well...

better go back to webster's, I have a feeling H0mersimps0n is the single-word definition of the word LUCK....

well the card was working great until i went to go screw it in. Now all I get are pretty lines up and down the screen... <sigh>

QUESTION:

So, took the solder gun to the card and decided it would be easier to connect the solder pts with solder (i.e. I removed the wire). Is radioshake solder conductive? will it be conductive enough? Damnit everything was working great then I wiggled the card and it stopped (didn't even touch the solder job)... well I'll let you all know how it works. Wish me luck or its $130 down the tubes

Ofcourse solder is conductive dude...... and it should work fine without the wire- but something else could have burnt up........

yeah it did :-(, wierd how it just up and died, it was running perfectly then lines across the screen and haven't been able to get it back...

eaten = $130

i would say the component that was soldered probibly diden't lke being that disconnected. probibly did enough damage to work for a bit and than called it quits. sorry to hear it man i just lost a CCFL to a dumb mistake. (wasn't as flexable as it needed to be) broke clean in half. i had it over the PCI screws and went to install a card.

btw if you haven't tried this yet try takeing it out and reseating it several times and see if that helps.

h0mersimps0n said:

yeah it did :-(, wierd how it just up and died, it was running perfectly then lines across the screen and haven't been able to get it back...

eaten = $130

Click to expand...

Dude, I feel for you. I hate seeing the loss of hardware. Fear not the NV30 is on it's way (prays to god...).

yeah I pray, yeah I tried re-seeding it like 50 times to no avail (I'm not THAT big of an idiot)...



thanks for the reponses and prayers

Well, you said you smelled frying parts... so something else in the circuit probably overheated & started imminent failure.

IF you can find this component, and it's replaceable, then you might be able to resurrect the card.

Can O' Beans said:

IF you can find this component, and it's replaceable, then you might be able to resurrect the card.

Click to expand...

Yup, I've got a GF2 card that I bought as 'refurbished' - you can see where an SMD capacitor used to be, and has been replaced with a couple of wires leading to a much larger capacitor like the ones you see on motherboards - presumably of the same value as the SMD that used to be there. It looks pretty rough, but works - and the card only cost me £43 (4 months ago). There may yet be hope for your GF4

Wow, nice job, now if only we could all do that, just think of the money saved on hardware replacement