Does repairing your own mining cards stress you out?

[zorachus99]

I recently had a 1070 fail.  One of the fans stopped and it wouldn't produce video.  Tried to clean the fans following an online video.

Unfortunately that didn't help at all.

BUT IT WAS SO DAMN STRESSFUL PULLING APART.

Thermal pads  tearing, exact spacing required unknown, dangers to circuit boards, and slips all contribute to fear of ruining a video card.

Does anyone know a service that does card rehab?  Replace all the pads and fans?

Edit - My location is California US.

[batsonxl]

Which country? How we could know where is it? If you have no idea give it to service or people who has experience.You need to be patient and open cards, if card was never opened then you should be more careful to not tear thermal pad, I do my own service and enjoy it always happy to repair any card and give it back to life again.

[zorachus99]

Which country? How we could know where is it? If you have no idea give it to service or people who has experience.You need to be patient and open cards, if card was never opened then you should be more careful to not tear thermal pad, I do my own service and enjoy it always happy to repair any card and give it back to life again.

Yeah, my card was probably already broke.  It stopped posting video.  Probably overheated and died. 

I have older 1080ti's I'd like to rehab, and I am not as knowledgeable as someone who does it a lot.

[batsonxl]

Which country? How we could know where is it? If you have no idea give it to service or people who has experience.You need to be patient and open cards, if card was never opened then you should be more careful to not tear thermal pad, I do my own service and enjoy it always happy to repair any card and give it back to life again.

Yeah, my card was probably already broke.  It stopped posting video.  Probably overheated and died. 

I have older 1080ti's I'd like to rehab, and I am not as knowledgeable as someone who does it a lot.

If card stopped video out it needs check there is couple reasons, i need to open and run some tests.
Be carefull with 1080ti it has looooooots of thermal pads much more than 1070 try not tear them if you are going to open that one too.

[sxemini]

Which country? How we could know where is it? If you have no idea give it to service or people who has experience.You need to be patient and open cards, if card was never opened then you should be more careful to not tear thermal pad, I do my own service and enjoy it always happy to repair any card and give it back to life again.

Yeah, my card was probably already broke.  It stopped posting video.  Probably overheated and died. 

I have older 1080ti's I'd like to rehab, and I am not as knowledgeable as someone who does it a lot.

If the card is dead then it is dead, you can't rehab it. The cards do not die from overheating, they shutdown if temp is to high.
And when changing a fan or thermalpad is a pain for you, go out of mining and go fishing or something else.

Sell dead cards on ebay, many people pay much money for dead cards.

[waywoos]

go to red panda mining on discord.
there are a few guys that have a channel on there
i know they are really busy however

[FloridaKid]

Which country? How we could know where is it? If you have no idea give it to service or people who has experience.You need to be patient and open cards, if card was never opened then you should be more careful to not tear thermal pad, I do my own service and enjoy it always happy to repair any card and give it back to life again.

Yeah, my card was probably already broke.  It stopped posting video.  Probably overheated and died. 

I have older 1080ti's I'd like to rehab, and I am not as knowledgeable as someone who does it a lot.

If the card is dead then it is dead, you can't rehab it. The cards do not die from overheating, they shutdown if temp is to high.
And when changing a fan or thermalpad is a pain for you, go out of mining and go fishing or something else.

Sell dead cards on ebay, many people pay much money for dead cards.

Do you know why people by dead cards? It's because they aren't really dead 100%, you even said heats can't kill a gpu? That's wrong mate heat can make gpu chips or memory chip get loosed and will need some resitting with heater to make the gpu start working again

[batsonxl]

Which country? How we could know where is it? If you have no idea give it to service or people who has experience.You need to be patient and open cards, if card was never opened then you should be more careful to not tear thermal pad, I do my own service and enjoy it always happy to repair any card and give it back to life again.

Yeah, my card was probably already broke.  It stopped posting video.  Probably overheated and died. 

I have older 1080ti's I'd like to rehab, and I am not as knowledgeable as someone who does it a lot.

If the card is dead then it is dead, you can't rehab it. The cards do not die from overheating, they shutdown if temp is to high.
And when changing a fan or thermalpad is a pain for you, go out of mining and go fishing or something else.

Sell dead cards on ebay, many people pay much money for dead cards.

Do you know why people by dead cards? It's because they aren't really dead 100%, you even said heats can't kill a gpu? That's wrong mate heat can make gpu chips or memory chip get loosed and will need some resitting with heater to make the gpu start working again

No mate it will not last long dont do that, you will make it worse buy heating. best way is 1st test MATS and other software then reball chip solder back if it is not working then changig chips will help for sure.
Yes i buy dead cards some of them works again some of them dead gpu some of them burnt mosfets some of them just reballing.It is good to have many dead gpus in hand because memory chips and gpu priceless

[adaseb]

I think the 2 common reasons why GPUs die is either some component like a MOSFET or Capacitor blowing up, usually you can replace that broken component and it should work again.

Another reason is either the card was dropped or you changed the thermal paste and pulled too hard to seperate the heatsink from the GPU chip and ended up damaging the solder joints. This is why sometimes the oven trick works in getting GPUs working again. Only proper way to fix this is you need to reball the GPU chip. Which is a pain and lots of work and experience. Only worth it maybe on high end GPUs >$500.

But I had that experience also when I opened up the GPU and I ripped the memory thermal pads and had them in pieces and couldn't find a proper replacement.

[fmz89]

I recently had a 1070 fail.  One of the fans stopped and it wouldn't produce video.  Tried to clean the fans following an online video.

Unfortunately that didn't help at all.

BUT IT WAS SO DAMN STRESSFUL PULLING APART.

Thermal pads  tearing, exact spacing required unknown, dangers to circuit boards, and slips all contribute to fear of ruining a video card.

Does anyone know a service that does card rehab?  Replace all the pads and fans?

Edit - My location is California US.

replacing fans is hard in mycountry, i need to order via aliexpress and wait for 2 weeks, so i bought the fan at bulk, just some case needed for the future

the other things teardown and cleaning is easy, just to lazy do this sometimes, for gpu died i use 2 method : first using steam solder to re-hot the card and most likely it fix some broken gpus, the other method is using detergent to cleanup the board , if the gpus stil died i send to gpus service for the last hope

as a miner you need buy some tool for gpus/rig maintenance
- steam solder
- iron solder
- blower for cleaning
- wattmeter
- screwdriver kit
- portable monitor

[Bravehash]

It's not stressful to pull a gpu apart, all you will be removing is the heat sink, how is that stressful? I've repaired two GPUs before with a pressing iron and it worked, the gpus still working due to high temp and I use the iron to sit the chip back in place, there are some videos on youtube about it

[adaseb]

It's not stressful to pull a gpu apart, all you will be removing is the heat sink, how is that stressful? I've repaired two GPUs before with a pressing iron and it worked, the gpus still working due to high temp and I use the iron to sit the chip back in place, there are some videos on youtube about it

Taking a GPU apart is not difficult but it’s a bad design where you need to separate the heat sink from PCB just to change out a fan. Fans commonly go bad and on some GPUs only way to replace the fan is you need to pull the heat sink assembly off.

Pulling heatsink assembly can cause issues. One of them is that the thermal pads usually rip. They commonly cover the memory chips and maybe some MOSFETs. So if they rip what do you do? You need to find a replacement somewhere and they are hard to locate. I had to over from like 3 different sellers until I got the correct thermal pad that would fit.

Second is that if the GPU is really old then it’s hard to separate from heatsink. So you pull and pull to get it off and usually break some solder balls in the process. Then when cold your GPU won’t work.

[FP91G]

Your stores do not sell thermal paste and perm pads.
You need to have 2 sets of thermal pads 0.5 mm ,1 mm,1.5 mm,2 mm in stock.
and such thermal paste
https://www.ozon.ru/product/termopasta-arctic-mx-4-4-gramma-160265987/#section-description--offset-80
Thermal conductivity of thermal pads 4-6 W / mK
Do not use ceramics and metals. For 1070, the usual ones are suitable.
When you remove the cooling system, you need to measure the thickness of the thermal pads and use the same
If the thickness is greater, you can stick one thermal pad on top of another.

Coolers change in such a way that the video card has to be mined, and not wait for repair.

[zorachus99]

It's not stressful to pull a gpu apart, all you will be removing is the heat sink, how is that stressful? I've repaired two GPUs before with a pressing iron and it worked, the gpus still working due to high temp and I use the iron to sit the chip back in place, there are some videos on youtube about it

Taking a GPU apart is not difficult but it’s a bad design where you need to separate the heat sink from PCB just to change out a fan. Fans commonly go bad and on some GPUs only way to replace the fan is you need to pull the heat sink assembly off.

Pulling heatsink assembly can cause issues. One of them is that the thermal pads usually rip. They commonly cover the memory chips and maybe some MOSFETs. So if they rip what do you do? You need to find a replacement somewhere and they are hard to locate. I had to over from like 3 different sellers until I got the correct thermal pad that would fit.

Second is that if the GPU is really old then it’s hard to separate from heatsink. So you pull and pull to get it off and usually break some solder balls in the process. Then when cold your GPU won’t work.

Amen brother.  The 1070 seemed dead already, but separating the heatsink from the PCB ripped half the pads to shit, not to mention the thermal paste had transformed into thermal cement.  I looked into the hassle of buying .5mm 1mm and 2mm pads online, and realized, why am I doing this?  Someone out there would probably make $$ repairing cards, right? 

Might try to sell it on Ebay, but I might get a bad review from a scammer even if I'm super clear the card does not work.  Life is complicated.

I have a few 1080ti's that are long in the tooth, and except for one amazing golden sample, they need to get the full cleanup to keep going IMO.  Replace the pads with high quality pads, new fans.  Maybe get 3+ more years out them.  They have ROI'ed many times now since I bought them in the 2017 craze.  I have my weakest 1080ti card mining at 107Watts and 30MH because of bad design/weak fans after 3 years.

[adaseb]

Did you try doing the oven trick on your dead GPUs. In my experience it brought about half of them back to life... for many another 3-9 months or so.

All you need to do is disassemble the GPUs from the heatsink, cover any components with aluminum foil, leave the GPU chip exposed, put it in at some desired temp and you are all set. There are videos on Youtube on how to do this. Best to use some toaster oven that you don't use.

Wait until it cools and put it back in. You will be surprised that most of the time it works. To make it last as long as possible try and don't do too many heat cycles because that kills it again. So leave you rig mining and don't shut it off too often. The more you shut it off and let it cool and then heat up again, the less hours you will get out of it.

[HashingTower]

I think the 2 common reasons why GPUs die is either some component like a MOSFET or Capacitor blowing up, usually you can replace that broken component and it should work again.

Another reason is either the card was dropped or you changed the thermal paste and pulled too hard to seperate the heatsink from the GPU chip and ended up damaging the solder joints. This is why sometimes the oven trick works in getting GPUs working again. Only proper way to fix this is you need to reball the GPU chip. Which is a pain and lots of work and experience. Only worth it maybe on high end GPUs >$500.

But I had that experience also when I opened up the GPU and I ripped the memory thermal pads and had them in pieces and couldn't find a proper replacement.

Presently I have a gpu here that's no more working, it's still very new but stop working due to wrong riser connection, I can't see any mosfet or capacitor getting burnt on the GPU, I can change it because I repair electronics, part of my side job but couldn't find the solution, anyone has such experience?

[FP91G]

Did you try doing the oven trick on your dead GPUs. In my experience it brought about half of them back to life... for many another 3-9 months or so.

All you need to do is disassemble the GPUs from the heatsink, cover any components with aluminum foil, leave the GPU chip exposed, put it in at some desired temp and you are all set. There are videos on Youtube on how to do this. Best to use some toaster oven that you don't use.

Wait until it cools and put it back in. You will be surprised that most of the time it works. To make it last as long as possible try and don't do too many heat cycles because that kills it again. So leave you rig mining and don't shut it off too often. The more you shut it off and let it cool and then heat up again, the less hours you will get out of it.

What is your experience with graphics cards after the oven trick?
I use a hair dryer from a soldering station for this, if friends ask for a very cheap subordinate video card, but you do not know which module needs to be heated.
My experience says that such video cards will then have to be heated every 1-2 months if they are used in mining.
9 months is an exception to the rule.