I've had my ENGTX480/2DI/1536MD5 GPU for 3 and half years now.
Over the past 2 months it started causing trouble. At first, it started seldom displaying big zones with
weird color, but simply turning my TV off and on again and it got back ok. Then it got worse. Under windows 7 x64, 340.52 driver, I got wierd pixalated screens, then screen would go black and the pop up, "driver stopped responding and was restarted" or something like that. Soon followed by 116 BSOD. It got more and more often. And completely random. Usually starts on windows, but once it happened, also occurs on boot screen. I can still use it, though I can never rely on it. It got unstable.
I have double checked temperatures, they were all under 60 C, under 69 worst cases. Auto cooling was working perfectly fine. I switched PC&C 910 W for a Corsair 750W, and nothing changed.
I've cleaned the gold fingers at first, checked for poor contact. Then dismounted the video card and got it all clean – no warranty anymore. The same goes on.
I have changed the video card for an old one and it works great, so I am sure motherboard is fine.
It seems to me a classical case of soldering issues over time. A reflow seems to be the last resource. I have checked over the net and the vast majority of people who somehow "baked" their GPUs and MBs got them working or living again, but for just some weeks/months. It seems clear to me that baking helped by changing the state of the solder, but done under the wrong profile!
Like many of you guys, I am a licensed electronic engineer and I have means to use a fully programmable oven. I mean an oven that supports programmable temperatures ramps and times. However, I can't find any temps and time profiles that are safe, indicated by any manufacturer or sustained by engineering professionals at all. Just found "i tried this", "do that", but no real references.
Does anybody know the correct complete profile for reflowing a GPU??
Best Answer
A typical soldering profile for a semiconductor is as follows (this one is from an ST datasheet).
In addition to this, you must bake the part for 24 hours under nitrogen atmosphere.
That's for one particular part. To guarantee safety you must look up every part on the board and make sure that the profile does not violate any limits for each component (perhaps the part was originally attached manually after reflow). Since you also want this to work, you have to ensure the profile is adequate for whatever solder was originally used. A conveyorized oven with multiple zones is usually used to get the required short residence time at the peak temperature.
In practice this is non-trivial, and for an attempted repair of something relatively cheap and where reliability is of little importance it is probably best to have at it with a nominal profile, perhaps shielding parts like through hole connectors and electrolytic capacitors with aluminum foil if they are far from the suspect areas. Batteries should be removed.