Bitcoin Forum

The 1x portion of my PCI-E card on my 5970 broke off. I was wondering if I could use a PCI-E extender, and solder it onto alternate points in the card. Does anybody know if this has been done and where they are?

Heres an example picture showing what part broke off, this isn't a picture of my card:

https://i.imgur.com/z6v3u.png

if you do it correct and isolate it nice this works, can you show a picture of ur card, there are situations where its too broken or it got broken inside, then fixing is mostly impossible, its cheaper to get a new one.

No, this won't work.

This broken portion of the PCI-e slot does not cover the x1 lane. It includes other important and necessary signals: +12V power, +3.3V power, SMBus pins, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pci-e#Pinout  The PCI-e lane signals are after the notch (to the right in your picture).

You will really need to repair this portion of the slot to fix your card, for example by soldering individual wires from the broken gold fingers to a flexible PCIe extender.

this x1000. Were you the guy that bought a bunch of broken video cards that had the PCI-E common pins cut off? (Who in the hell even thought that would work?)
Also, FWIW, the first PCI-E lane (PCI-E 1x) consists of 7 pins after that chunk that got cut off.

No, I am not that guy. But I did introduce the idea of down-plugging x16 cards in x1 slots to the Bitcoin community.

16x to 1 will not work as it still takes the bit that's broke off.

The only way you could poss do this is by re soldering and mounting cable onto the connectors providing their is something that can be soldered to and then getting an old one and wiering to that but the might not even take. You could try to do via soldering to the board and finding a blueprint to the motherboard but this takes skills to do such tiny soldering work.

Might want to just get a new card or do an RMA on it if its still got something on it and just advise them that it burnt out and completely snapped off.

I think you didn't read/understand what I wrote.

Depending on any other damage (IE internal copper layers now shorted or vias from internal layers to the top or bottom copper broken off and missing) you should be able to repair it. You'd really need to post a picture of the actual damage itself. If it's just the tab and nothing else it should be a pretty simple repair.

There are commercial board repair kits available for this.......

They consist of sticky copper tracks and connectors on a backing of paper, that allows the repairman to peel them off and 're-make' the connections.

I have a manual some place....


K found it
You need to dig this off the internet.... it is a repair mans 'wet dream'
IPC-7721 Repair and Modification of Printed Boards and Electronic Assemblies

Then you need  around section:
3.5.3 Base Material Repair Edge Transplant method...
4.2.2 Conductor repair foil jumper.
4.6.1 Edge contact repair

Thank you for this great information.

That's a cool idea, but I'd be more inclined to see if I could attach something to replace the tab, then modify the riser cable to extend its pins upward, so that when you slid it into place, the pins would make contact with the board above the replacement tab. The replacement tab would only be there to provide something for the riser to hold on to. I'd really hesitate on soldering the board, but that's just me.