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First, do not "reflow" this card, assuming that by "reflow" you mean put it in a domestic oven. That's a good way to turn a working card into a dead one. The worst case scenario here is that you graft some case fans onto this thing. What I would do is get out an ohm meter and start probing...

I’d have it repaired. Did they say what’s actually wrong with it?

The [H]ard way, obviously. The cleanest way to deal with this would be to desolder the connector. It'd be pretty easy to do with a hot air station, but you could probably use a regular soldering iron and coax it off of there. Once you hand the mangled connector off, for bonus points, you...

This sounds to me like a BGA failure, or damage to the board. It's also possible that it's something like a cracked solder joint on some other component, but if it's intermittent, or it works if you press on certain components, it's probably something mechanical that's failed.

Are any of the fan blades dirty? It's probably a combination of worn bearings and an imbalance in the fan blades. You can try cleaning them, but the real fix is probably to replace the fan harness with a new one.

What was the result of removing the low side FET? Did that clear your short to ground? Removing the coils might help. That effectively breaks the circuit in half - you've got the VRM half on one side, and the logic side on the other. You can then check each side for a short separately, and...

I'd imagine resistance on the coils should be around 30 ohms, but I can't remember ever having measured a 500 series card. I've got one at home I can check later, if you need me to.

What test did you do? Just measuring the resistance to ground on the coils? The software tests such as using TSserver are more relevant for a card that sorta-kinda works.

Yes. BGA = ball grid array. This is the type of solder technology that's used to attach the GPU and memory chips, with a grid of tiny solder balls on the underside. It's pretty common in older electronics for the solder joints to crack, or pull the pads off of the board, and the behavior...

Probably a BGA failure of some kind, but another possibility is something like a faulty bootstrap capacitor which is causing one of the phases to run super hot. You'd check for that with a thermal camera, freeze spray, etc. If you've got one phase that's way hotter than the others...

I really meant just the low side FETs, which are the ones that stand between the switch node and ground in the buck converter (you should really read about how a buck converter works before you do anything else). Each "phase" in the VRM has two transistors - a high side, which switches the 12V...

In this situation, that's likely to make things worse, and not better. Hardgfg's card has experienced a failure in the memory VRM that's created a fairly high resistance short to ground. This isn't an issue of the BGA solder joints failing - something else on the board has most likely melted...

Generally yes, but it doesn't always work, especially when the short is still fairly high in resistance, as yours is, and thus doesn't flow much current. The best tools to locate the warm spots on the board are, in this order: 1. a thermal camera 2. freeze spray 3. isopropanol 4. your lips 5...

How are you supplying the voltage? A bench power supply should tell you how much current it's applying. Did you try the isopropanol technique I mentioned? Watching the isopropanol evaporating is probably the best way, other than a thermal camera or freeze spray. Using your fingers won't...

Try putting some isopropanol on some of the suspect components, such as the FETs and the GPU die, and then turn the power supply on and leave it on for a couple of minutes, while you watch to see where the alcohol evaporates the fastest. If you still don't see anything, start checking other...

How are you checking for changes in temperature?

No. You're injecting voltage into the memory power plane - it will reach all of those components, and then flow (mostly) through the one with the lowest resistance, dissipating energy as heat. No need to do anything other than solder a wire to the coil terminal, supply 1.0V, and look for...

You can try to start with just 1-2A if you want, but I would guess that you won't get enough temperature delta with less than 10A to be able to tell, unless you have a really good thermal camera. You should not put a heatsink on the GPU - you actually want to see the die itself, so you can see...

You can solder the wire to either end of any of the coils on that VRM. It doesn't really matter which end, or which one you choose, since they're all wired up together, and the coils don't have a meaningful effect if you're supplying a constant voltage. Obviously, the other end of the wire...

Correct. You want to inject current into the coil, basically replacing the functioning VRM with your lab power supply, so you can use whatever means you have available to see where all that energy is going.

I giggled at 'Wanptek.' Sounds like it's named after the sad trombone riff. He said he's in Europe, and that stuff there is a lot more expensive, so he may not have the same number of options we have in the states, but I have a similar unit that I've used with success to fix some graphics...

There are a few options: * Perform a visual inspection and see if you can see physical damage to any components * Guess what might be wrong and start removing parts until the short is cleared. Be aware that if you remove any semiconductors, you will likely need to replace them with new ones...

You're not looking for any particular temperature - just areas that get hotter than the rest. Assuming the board is at ambient temperature, you're looking for components or parts of the board that are detectably warmer than that, since that's where the energy from the current you inject is...

Yes, although now that I think about it, I think you should do the current injection test first, and resort to removing the FETs if you don't find anything that gets warm. Keep in mind that the large BGA components (GPU and memory ICs) are supposed to get warm, so you'd really only be concerned...

Yes, that's what I meant. 4.2 ohms is probably low, as you suspect. You could try removing the low side FET from the affected phase. If that doesn't work, try removing the FETs from the other phase. If that still doesn't clear the short, solder a wire the coil terminals of the memory, and...

When you say "resistance on that mosfet," which terminal are you measuring? It matters. A lot. The only terminals on the FET packages where you can expect to see different resistance values (edit: from one phase to another) are the gates. The sources and drains are all wired up together...

How did you determine which FET package you needed to remove? Also, what type of memory chips does this particular board have? One thing that should probably be noted when troubleshooting memory issues is that not every brand of memory chips has the same resistance, so the "known good" value...

Probably also Ciri. And maybe also Roach, if we're being honest.

I just don't know exactly what they'll do. They may swap the fans on your card out, or they may just send you a refurb card, or send you new fans to change yourself.

You can get replacement fan sets. Probably a pretty easy job to swap them. Or you can RMA the card, and MSI will (probably) do it for you.

For future videos, try dialing up a higher frame rate (say, 60 or 120) in the camera when you shoot it, and then play it back at 30 or 24fps in your edit, to make your B-roll shots look more dramatic. Neat build, though. What does this machine actually do?

I wonder why he "lost" it. Wouldn't it be easier to just say "Yeah, we still have it, but haven't made any progress toward getting it working?" I guess unless he really did lose it, in which case, that's a dumbass thing to do.

I was mostly being facetious, but it was an allusion to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/15shoyx/madison_on_her_ltt_experience/ I don't think she was actually an intern, but she got hired after she won a contest where she'd appear on camera with Linus (building a PC or...

You'd think he'd have people to keep track of this sort of thing. I guess they're too busy harassing the interns or something?

Pretty cool. Please tell us that you've built that machine into an NTP server, though.

I think that should work, but you may have to do some fiddling to keep the OS from treating it as a monitor.

Displayport supports audio. It should just appear as an audio device in the list when you click the speaker icon. The name is usually something like the model name of the monitor or amp. On the original topic, I'm not currently using the TOSLINK port on any of my motherboards, but I have in...

I think he said in the past that it's some sort of medical image processing application.