A few years back while using Windows XP, I was seeing weird red lines across my monitor, the same happened with Vista. At first I thought it is an issue with my monitor but on further research it was revealed that the graphics card has gone broke.
What happens when your graphic card stops working? Either you will throw it in the trash, save it for ‘old memories’ or sell it on eBay, but it turns out most of them can be fixed by simply heating in the oven.
The small micro-connections between the chip and the board gets fractured over time by constant heating and cooling. By heating it in the oven, they will expand until they reconnect and then upon cooling they will be permanently reconnected again.
Reader Cod3r explains,
The concept behind this method is simple: Reflow Soldering.
Commercial Electric circuit boars are made of SMT IC’s (Surface Mount Technology). These IC’s are soldered on the board by placing a layer of solder on the board, placing the ic’s and then passing the entire thing through a Oven or a hot air blower. The places of electrical contacts get attached, while the rest of the solder melts and flows away.
Over time, these electrical contacts may develop “HairLine Fractures or cracks” that are not visible to the naked eye. If any such crack disconnects a electrical line or a chip’s pin, then errors occur, depending on the place/chip on the board.
Graphic cards, and Laptop Motherboards are very prone to this, because of the stresses they take, but this can happen to any electrical item.
By “Baking” the card in the oven, all u do is to remelt the non-visible solder, in the hope that it would automatically reflow and repair the connection. (its still pure dumb luck, but with an educated style
)
Please note that the cooking oven(NOT the microwave oven) has to be preheated at 385F before putting the card in it. Recently, my friend over at MBL forum baked the cards for 10 minutes before taking them out, but the time can vary. According to most users 8 minutes will do the trick.
The procedure requires you to lay an aluminum foil beneath the card so that heat can be reflected, also make sure the card is raised using small aluminum balls. Aluminum foil keeps the oven safe in case anything goes wrong.
You need to disconnect everything from the card and clean the dust before inserting it in the preheated oven. Head over to MBL Forum and Hard Forum for full screenshot tour and details. This method can be applied to fix your Laptop as well by baking it’s motherboard.
Editor’s Notes: This guide is for those who have lost all hope. Do not try it unless you know the risks. Many users in various forums have had success with this method. If you are having any other problem, make sure the drivers are updated and the card is not defected on purchase.
It turns out this method is quite popular, one person has made the whole video guide on YouTube(embedded below).
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16 Comments
The concept behind this method is simple: Reflow Soldering
Commercial Electric circuit boars are made of SMT IC's (Surface Mount Technology). These IC's are soldered on the board by placing a layer of solder on the board, placing the ic's and then passing the entire thing through a Oven or a hot air blower. The places of electrical contacts get attached, while the rest of the solder melts and flows away.
Over time, these electrical contacts may develop “HairLine Fractures or cracks” that are not visible to the naked eye. If any such crack disconnects a electrical line or a chip's pin, then errors occur, depending on the place/chip on the board.
Graphic cards, and Laptop Motherboards are very prone to this, because of the stresses they take, but this can happen to any electrical item.
By “Baking” the card in the oven, all u do is to remelt the non-visible solder, in the hope that it would automatically reflow and repair the connection. (its still pure dumb luck, but with an educated style
)
Hope i cleared all the dis ambiguities.
See this for full details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflow_soldering
Note:
The concept behind this method is simple: Reflow Soldering.
Commercial Electric circuit boars are made of SMT IC's (Surface Mount Technology). These IC's are soldered on the board by placing a layer of solder on the board, placing the ic's and then passing the entire thing through a Oven or a hot air blower. The places of electrical contacts get attached, while the rest of the solder melts and flows away.
Over time, these electrical contacts may develop “HairLine Fractures or cracks” that are not visible to the naked eye. If any such crack disconnects a electrical line or a chip's pin, then errors occur, depending on the place/chip on the board.
Graphic cards, and Laptop Motherboards are very prone to this, because of the stresses they take, but this can happen to any electrical item.
By “Baking” the card in the oven, all u do is to remelt the non-visible solder, in the hope that it would automatically reflow and repair the connection. (its still pure dumb luck, but with an educated style
)
Hope i cleared all the dis ambiguities.
@Coder, Why do you have to re-post the comments second time :S.
Here is some more links on Youtube for the whole process.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j7iJxDNasA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ms9oy00zFQ&feat...
yeah this true indeed, have been tried this teknik and it works, electronic parts in the board overtime will cause the solder to loose contact and with this teknik will solve those loose contact.
Worked for me, my 8800gts died and started artifacting and causing my computer to crash. I still wanted to wait till the next generation of nvida cards came out before I upgraded, the warranty was expired and I had nothing to lose. So I removed the heatsync cleaned off all the themal paste with some paper towel and rubbing alcohol baked it at 385 for 11 minutes. Let it cool for 30 minutes and baked it again at 385 for 11 minutes. I ended up using 2 tubes of ocz freeze thermal compound between the gpu and all the ram its a good compound that is not metallic based and I figured if I did a sloppy job artic silver might cause some other problems.
But now its working fine, even though I understood why it works, I'm still blown away.
i tryed this trick but i heated to long and spent then next hour soldering back on the large capasitors on the back of a 7800gt when i finish i tested and wow it works but i seen a few videos on utube and i think place the graphics card gpu side up the next time i try lol but even the guy in that video places his in gpu side up too
I am having this problem with my computer but I dont think I am ready to try this method, i think its complicated and can be risky if you dont know what youre doing. I think I will just buy a new PC…ha ha.
Will this work with the XBOX360 red ring of death issue?
You DON'T HAVE TO PREHEAT THE OVEN, is more safe to trow the board inside and then turning the heat on.
The process has a maximum heat/time scheme of 3°C/sec for heating and 6°C/sec for cooling. If you don't respect this temperature/time scheme, the IC's can crack for the subit heating, the same way that if you put a hot glass dish from the oven directly on cold water.
I have a NVidia 9800gt and it had the same blue lines that was in the video. I installed the card and it wouldn’t install drivers or anything. The resolution was really low and it looked like crap. I thought that this was a joke, but I tell you what, this is the real deal. After I baked my card and installed it in my computer it installed drivers and started working like brand new. This is a really cool trick. Thank you for saving my a couple of hundred dollars.
Amazing! I tried it on my dead Nvidia 8800GT and it actually worked. I did 10 minutes at 385 degrees F and let it cool for 30 minutes. Before the bake, the machine wouldn’t even finish booting with the card installed, and would show screen artifacts while trying to boot. Now after the bake, everything works just fine, and passed 30 minutes of gaming stress testing. The card looked just the same before and after the baking.
Hello,
that’s actually a good and inteligent fix;
however after trying that as described, it wont show anything now!
screen is black since i press power button, does it mean it’s really gone now? or i must’ve done some wrong? Everything else seems to be working just fine, though i can’t see a thing.
Really need it working again.
Thank you
This fix worked after having Starcraft 2 fried my Asus 320mb 8800 GTS and caused it to have blue vertical lines from boot up until windows in safe mode. The culprit is the new 258.96 beta drivers. I followed the instructions in this post and took the heatsink off the card and cleaned off the compound and dust on the chip. After 10 minutes of baking at 200Celcius, I removed the gfx and let it air cool on the kitchen bench for 30 minutes. I replaced everything back together and popped it back into the computer and the lines were gone. The reverted back to 197.45 and it is working better than ever! Starcraft 2 is looking gorgeous!
@syke
man, my gc 4850 also get artifact when trying SC2 for d 1st time, and i get it during the 1st campaign movie…i was so surprise lol, a SC2 movie fried my gc ==”…will try to Rma 1st, if cant will try tis move =)
and thxs for tis great guide =)
Baked a video card for three times and it worked every time perfectly.
But the baking trick can not fix the card permanently.
Three weeks ago, baked the card for the first time (10 min @ 380 Fahrenheit) . Then the card worked for about 5 hours, and died in two days.
Two weeks ago, baked 10 min @ 385 Fahrenheit. Then the card worked about 50 hours, and died again in two weeks.
Yesterday, baked 10 min @ 390 Fahrenheit. Now it is working. The question is — for how long?
heloo, i have a Palit nvidea 8600 GT 512m ddr2 GPU my prob is when i plug it in motherboard it works fine, butttt when i install drivers , it work 15/20 min fine, after that it shows some colourful line on monitor , and system stop responding/HANG. I tried updated my driver dirctly from Nvidea, and i tried it on othe machines also. and my Card is Out of warranty can any 1 suggest me what to dooo???? should i go to Graphic card spcealist/engeenier,??? or i have to buy a new one, plz reply me on karankapoor2006@yahoo.co.in
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