Reviving a memory failed 7970M with oven reflow

Hey everyone,

Yesterday I started a thread asking for advice on which card to replace my very recently failing 7970M.

Yesterday I got up from my desk to get some water and upon returning, found my screens blank and unresponsive. After restarting my M17XR4, I could see red lines and many artifacts. Couldnt load Windows because it would shut down before that. Ran Dell Diagnostics and got Error Code 2000-0332 - Video Memory Integrity Test Discrepancy".

Was totally bummed. Dell has a repair service for out of warranty systems for Canadians for 550$ plus tax. Similar cards are in the 400$ range CAD.

I then remembered my struggles with an old 7900GT in my previous M1710 Dell XPS laptop. I had wanted to upgrade so didnt care much for fixing the broken card at the time, but I did remember reading about "reflowing GPUs" in the oven at home. Obviously this is a last resort type of deal, and in this case, I had nothing to lose.

Took off the heatsink and dried thermal paste, made little aluminum legs for it that fit into the 4 screw holes for the heatsink so no part of the card was touching any metal in the oven and let her sit there at 385 degrees for 11 minutes.


Took it out, let it cool, put the heatsink back on (didnt have any thermal paste on hand; which I just got back from purchasing) and put her back in the laptop.

Behold, no artifacts, no errors. Had some weird software glitching including;
- Skype not being able to load,
- Alienware respawn having to close and not load,
- AMD catalyst control center saying that it wouldnt load and had no settings to modify,
- Battle.Net desktop app not loading either.

So I uninstalled the drivers and reinstalled. Everything seems to be working fine. All previous software problems are resolved and just ran 3dMark11 and got a score of 6900.

I know this might only be a temporary fix, but damn, its working so far!

Get the word out.

I would be happy to answer any questions related to the process.

Thanks for reading.

 

Bump for community knowledge

 

Nice job. Glad that worked and you can hopefully get a few more miles out of the GPU.

 

ahaha love those sucess story .. godd stuff!

 

I'm really happy for you in that it's working but having done this a couple of times in the past, it works fine for a few months max and then dies again. I hope the fix works longer for you but I'd also be inclined to backup anything important and have a plan in place for if/when it dies again.

 

Did the same a while ago and it still works like a charm (on a r4 that is owned by a friend, my own r4 luckely never had any problems).

 

Your very lucky it worked - from experience with these newer amd cards a reflow doesn't usually fix the issue and I have access to professional reflow equipment!
Treat this method with caution as you can make the issue much worse.