GTX 680M

Ok so I am getting the 43 error in the driver section.

Card no longer seems to be working.

Is there actually anything I can attempt to do to fix the card? Bake it in the oven? Replace something on it?

What usually breaks on these things?

Any information would be good to feed my curiosity.

Cheers!

 

Usually a solder joint but it could be anything.

 

Hmmm so I imagine trying to fix the damn thing would be useless....

I did actually update the VBIOS on it successfully.

Tried old drivers... New drivers...

Nothing, still CODE 43. Oh well!

 

Bake it! Might take few tries to make it work or last again. Nothing to lose anyways.
It would be wise to use an old oven so you won't contaminate your food.

 

Have you visually inspected it?

 

I will take another look at it!

 

Would a heatgun work? Warp the sensitive areas in aluminium foil and then heat the areas that are required?

 

If you know wich area needs the heat then yes.

 

Yes, you only need to heat up the die. But also make sure to heat the bga pcb it's soldered on; you don't want too much temperature differences. Best of all is to pre-heat the entire board in an oven to something like 150°C and only then heat the die to the reflow temperature. That way you'll have a minimum of thermal expansion differences (a rework station uses the same concept).

Use a temperature-controlled heat gun now, but a pure oven solution also did the job. Both methods worked successfully for both AMD, Nvidia and motherboards (chipset or embedded graphics). One 680M among the lot, too. Check ' reflow window lead-free bga' for the optimal temperatures:

Spoiler: reflow windows

 

Fantastic thank you for this information.

I have managed to make a contact with someone close to me who has a reflow station.

Hopefully that does the job and it is just a loose solder connection... Wish me luck!

 

Usually it's a patch but does not hold out long term.

 

Ok using a heat gun and setting it just to 130 degrees for 5 minutes over the GPU chip has revived the card.

Came across a video on youtube talking about this idea of "reflowing" is essentially incorrect.

All you have to actually do is heat the GPU chip up to around 120-130 degrees.

Which I have done and boom it now works again. Temporarily though I am sure.

What worries me is that 2nd hand cards could be sold like this as if they are still in good working order and then fail a few days or weeks down the line at which point the seller says oh nothing to do with me...

 

It does reflow it but it's the bumps between the silicon (shiny square) and package rather the package and the motherboard.

 

Ah that is interesting! Thank you for enlightening me on this

 

That's why a reball of the package is just a reflow for the solder that's actually for the issue.

A chip replacement (so new chip and package) would fix the card itself by the sounds of things. Not the kind of thing to be found off the shelf except at the Shenzhen market.

 

Yeah I was thinking how would one get their hands on just the GPU chip of any given graphics card. Wish there was a components website where this sort of stuff could be ordered off!

 

Solder melts at 217C. Heating to less than this can fix a card because heating can cause the card to bend back into shape and make broken contacts touch, but they are not soldered so the reformed connection can easily be lost. I have never had this result in a longtime solution and the card would always fail again, usually in a few weeks.

I have found heating a failing card past 217C to reflow the solder to be as effective as fully removing, reballing, and resoldering the core around half the time if solder flux is also placed in a ring around the core.

If the card has not had any long periods of prolonged elevated temperature within the past month you will need to bake the moisture out. If you don't it will literally pop like popcorn. Put it in an oven at 100C for 5 hours.

 

That has been my experience as well, whereas reflows lasted for years or even indefinitely.

Taking out the moisture out of the equation is also very good advice. All factories and manufacturers recommend the same thing and looking back at my hastier repairs jobs then the contacts show oxidation after a year or so while a properly tackled soldering job looks no different from the factory work.

You can order them from ebay or aliexpress for $50-100 (new or used). Recently got a 1070M from there. The thing is that you have to search for the chip number, so ' N17E-G2-A1', say. TPU has those listed under ' GPU variant'.

Technically those things are still not the real chip; that's what Meaker is referring to. The die itself is soldered to the package and that package, in turn, has to be soldered to the card's pcb. But even that bit is quite a difficult beast to tackle with a normal hot air station (think ' hit-and-miss'). Really need a machine with x-ray capability for that and, while tempting, it'd be a bit iffy to warrant its purchasing cost for just one project.

 

Outstanding information! Thank you for passing on this knowledge.

 

Depends on the solder being used, lead free tends to be less than that temperature.