Some moths ago i bought an old radeon 3870 for my retro pc project, i tested it for 20 minutes with futurmark and everything was OK so i dedided to put it in storage while i was gathering the rest of the components (dual core 939 platform).
This week i finally got the rest of the parts and started to assemble the pc, but first i had to do a proper cleaning of the card and new thermal paste had to be applied, after assembling it, the card seemed to work fine but ramdomly after maybe 7-10 minutes artifacts appeared on screen (some vertical lines but no BSOD or crashes) if i move a window affected by these lines to a working area, the deffect persist only in the area of the affected window.
So i thought it was a problem with the VRAM framebuffer, maybe a cracked solder joint caused by the heatsink pressure (first time i have broken a card while cleaning it), therefore i decided to reflow the vram chips, i placed the card in a preheater at 130ºC, covered the VRM and GPU chip with foil tape and applied FLUX to the VRAM chips (kingbo rma218), i carefully reflowed chip by chip with the hot air station with no nozzle, air at 50% and 380ºC, i made sure the solder melted by carefully poking with a tweezer on each chip, after leting it to cool down and reassemblig the card again, this time more artifact showed up.
At this point my theories are:
A) The flux residue is causing a defective behavior
B) I damaged some chips with the heat
C) Maybe the problem was the GPU chip
D) Poking around with melted solder balls isn't a good idea (i was very carefully, all chips seem to be in place and varely moved them, so this posibillity is unlikely i think)
My options are:
A) Reball the ram chips (i have never done this before)
B) Replace the video chips (K4U52324QE-BC08)
¿Any advice/suggestions?
Thanks in advance.
This week i finally got the rest of the parts and started to assemble the pc, but first i had to do a proper cleaning of the card and new thermal paste had to be applied, after assembling it, the card seemed to work fine but ramdomly after maybe 7-10 minutes artifacts appeared on screen (some vertical lines but no BSOD or crashes) if i move a window affected by these lines to a working area, the deffect persist only in the area of the affected window.
So i thought it was a problem with the VRAM framebuffer, maybe a cracked solder joint caused by the heatsink pressure (first time i have broken a card while cleaning it), therefore i decided to reflow the vram chips, i placed the card in a preheater at 130ºC, covered the VRM and GPU chip with foil tape and applied FLUX to the VRAM chips (kingbo rma218), i carefully reflowed chip by chip with the hot air station with no nozzle, air at 50% and 380ºC, i made sure the solder melted by carefully poking with a tweezer on each chip, after leting it to cool down and reassemblig the card again, this time more artifact showed up.
At this point my theories are:
A) The flux residue is causing a defective behavior
B) I damaged some chips with the heat
C) Maybe the problem was the GPU chip
D) Poking around with melted solder balls isn't a good idea (i was very carefully, all chips seem to be in place and varely moved them, so this posibillity is unlikely i think)
My options are:
A) Reball the ram chips (i have never done this before)
B) Replace the video chips (K4U52324QE-BC08)
¿Any advice/suggestions?
Thanks in advance.
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