FEATURED THE OVEN TRICK - WORKED

[AlienAndy]

Hi guys. I just thought I would pop back and say that since repair my 8800 Ultra has been utterly flawless.

However I did want to stress that propping the card up on stilts or balls is a bad idea. Both sides of the card have components on and if you leave air underneath them when baking gravity will take over.

When I baked mine I kept it flat against the dull side of the foil. Basically I covered the baking tray with foil leaving the dull side up as the shiny side will reflect the heat. However, I put the card directly on it. The alu will not melt and nothing will stick to it, so putting it on balls or stilts is a false economy.

I also applied pressure to the culprits of failure (main GPU and RAMDAC) by wrapping lots of coins in foil and standing them on the chips. This prevents the chip lifting as the heat melts the solder forming hourglass shapes that are prone to failing. It also pushes the chips back down into the solder forming a good bond.

 

[Fabius]

Another successful cooked video card!
My 8800 ultra has come back from hell!

thanks for the trick

 

[TechDem]

I've been a tech now for quite some years, and I have been reflowing GPU's using a Aoyue 968 reflow station, but this trick is WOW, it astounds me the success rate is so high.

Note for Xbox 360 bakers, go on E-bay and search for No clean Liquid Flux, take off your heat sinks and use a syringe or pippette to suck up some of the Flux, you don't need alot. Now just squirt some between the epoxy mounts (if your version has them) on 2 sides, top and side, then roll the board around a bit to make sure you get an even spread, I usually do all four sides and works great. You may take a paper towel and wipe off the excess that will come out the other side of the chip (If it does not you probably have not put enough flux under there) .

After this is done apply pressure to the chips either by re-applying the heatsinks or using the penny tricks as described above. FYI Baking the Xbox motherboard also has the affect of straightening it out a bit if it's warped. If you leave the Xbox in it's metal housing it seems provide enough protection for some reason not to blow your capacitors. That's why you see people wrapping their boards with clothes and foil and stuff, to keep the capacitors and other surface mounted parts that should not be exposed to that much heat safe.

Kudo's to whoever started this thread, I've been reading so long I've forgotten lol.

On a side note, for *****'s and Giggles I just put a Xbox 360 that has a possible cold solder joint under the ram or CPU into the oven at 400 degrees for 7 minutes. We'll see what happens, my hopes are not high I think it's the CPU itself that is bad.. I've not given in to reballing a new one yet.

 

[michal01000]

WOOW!!

I put my dead 8600GT 512 into Oven and.... after 9 minutes I have work perfectly VGA card

 

[Wega!]

This thread almost make me wish i had a defect vidcard

 

[TechDem]

Update: Unfortunately the Xbox did not work, I do believe it to be a bad CPU though so no big other than 30 minutes

However I did notice the board's capacitors were bulging (They weren't before) , so 400 F is a bit too hot at 7 minutes, if I try it again maybe I'll go for 350. Although even though it's more of a pain in the *** I think I'll save the oven trick as a last resort and go back to my Reflow Station ^^

Good luck with future oven bakes!


*EDIT* Oh, and yes I know about shielding the capacitors with hvac tape, foil etc.. one of these days I'll make a set of shields. Just never have 2 hours to spend putting something together I'd use once in a while

 

[Neuromancer]

This thread almost make me wish i had a defect vidcard

I got one and not willing to try it.

 

[amnios]

should I bake my GTX 280?

Where the heck can I send it that will 100% get it working? Who does that stuff?

The card, if working, is likely still worth $180 Canadian but since I have one already I'd pay upto $120 have it fixed.

I RMA'd the card but they didn't fix it... BFG sucked near the end.

I hate to goto the oven.

 

[b0cks]

This was awesome. Before I got my GTX 470 my 8800GTS died. The oven method fixed it and it was working as soon as it cooled down. After about 6 months it died again though, BUT baking it again worked haha. No problems in my second computer so far. This was nearly a year ago.

It works, it's awesome.

 

[amnios]

Before baking I was having trouble getting a stable SLI with my pair of BFG OC GTX 280's...

I localized the problem to the one card... which worked fine for windows and non 3d stuff... even with this single card installed it could not run a 3d app or game like...

RMA's it but BFG was going out of business and they did not fix it. Weeks went by with a single remaining GTX 280 system...

So last night I took it apart easy enough... cleaned the paste off, removed the clear plastic "L" shaped piece for the green board light...

and baked it at 395 F for about 10 - 12 minutes.

the next day I put it back together and now I am running SLI

Coincidence?

 

[nd4spdbh2]

I am going to add ANOTHER successful bake to the list here.

Another 9800gt 512. This one had some SERIOUS artifacting (first image) and it wouldnt even think about actually using the driver (error 10 in device manager = device can not start).

9 min @ ~ 395*F, turned off oven propped door open and let it sit inside and cool down.... put her all back together and WALA... perfect gfx card, ran an HOUR of furmark @ 1680x1050 with 16x aa (aka stressing the **** out of it) topped 85*C, turned the comp off bout an hr ago to let her do a heat cycle. and now doing another run of furmark.

Also cooling down fresh from a bake is another 8800gt 512... i dont have high hopes for this one tho. absolutely no picture no boot no nothin to begin with.

 

[toneay]

Another success story to card baking. Was running dual 8800 GTS', went to upgrade to Windows 7 x64 and it wouldn't let me finish installing. Did alot(I mean alot) of troubleshooting, figured out one of my cards was artifacting(wasn't the one using for display.) I found the bake trick on this website after hours of googling and EVGA telling me that they refuse to observe the warranty on my card(limited lifetime) I decided to try it out since I had done the towel trick to man a RROD XBoxs and what do you know. Worked like a charm. Great ingenuity.

Edit: I registered on this website only to post my success story.

 

[nd4spdbh2]

And again... another success story for myself....

This time a 8800GTX.... the thing was DUSTY as hell... obviously never cleaned out, and thus what lead to most likely ram over heating causing fractures in the bga solder. It would get to the desktop fine, but as soon as a 3d app was launched it would crash... again 9 min at 380 - 390ish solved all issues this far.... and i assume for the life of the card as long as its dusted out on a regular basis.

 

[nd4spdbh2]

And again... another success story for myself...

As i said just a short while ago... another successful bake.

This time a 8600GTS.... booted it before baking (as i always do to see how bad the card is)... this one was pretty bad, worse than the 8800gtx i just fixed... as you can see in the picture below.

380-395*F for 9 min as always. Then a nice clean application of arctic silver ceramique, and she works like a charm... just finished 4 hrs of furmark just fine... and im letting it completely cool off and ill do some more furmark to verify that the card is fine

 

[muddocktor]

And you can add yet another success story to this thread.

I have a BFG 9800GTX that konakona gave me at the benching party. He evidently had bought it artifacting heavily for very cheap and then didn't get around to trying the oven trick on it and decided to give it to me to try the oven trick on.

I tested the card out when I got home and found it artifacting heavily (almost as bad as the pic nd4 posted above) and gave me the driver error in windows. So I had stripped the heatsink off last week and cleaned it up to prep it and finally got around to doing it last night. I set the oven to convection bake at 390 degrees and after it got to operating temp, stuck the card in for 9 minutes and dropped the temp back off to 385 degrees. At the 9 minute mark, I turned it off, opened the door to the first notch and let it cool down for around 45 minutes before removing the card. I wiped everything down with 90% IPA and then applied some IC7 Diamond to the GPU and assembled the card, then went to sleep last night. Today, I just shoved it into my test system and booted right up, with no artifacts or driver problems. I presently have it running Furmark on the torture setting and so far it's doing just great!!! I'm going to give it an hour run on the torture test, then pull it out of the test rig and do some benching with it.

 

[gofaster87]

The bake lives on.

 

[Automata]

This thread cannot die. Once it stops working, we simply put it in the oven at 400 degrees for 10 minutes and it comes back to life.

 

[gofaster87]

This thread actually came up in discussion, when IMOG was down for CES, while eating dinner.

 

[Automata]

You were at CES?

I'd love to go...

 

[gofaster87]

I didnt actually walk the floor. I met up with Dave and Matt for dinner. Matt got us into the MSI/Intel party and the next day we hung out at the XS meet.