Broken board-BEWARE

[uwackme]

I waas tying to remove the aluminum plate heatsink from the back of my 9700pro-ness. One of the little chippie's broke off.

Reason for breaking, 6 cold solderjoints out of 8...the other 2 well soldered pins yanked off the chip.

This board was eventually going to FAIL due to this... Sapphire 9500non-pro converted...soft then hard... to 9700, 3.0ns Infineon rams.

The tough compromise in manufacture when soldering ballgridarrays (GPU/ram) vs the other stuff is very hard. Seems the boyz on the line in China havent got it perfected.

So when doing mods, go ahead and lightly reheat the solder joints on the DIP IC's.... like the SC1175, etc we do mods too.

Just a warning- Jim

[saaya]

so what did you brake off? memory? glue it back on with arctic silver termal compound!

[NickK]

A mate broke off a surface mount resistor or cap - stuck it back on with conductive paint..

[Matt McFaul]

sorry to hear that....but been there done that as well. I rma'd the card and ati fixed it at no cost. I b.s.'ed them along the way telling them that one of my other 9700pros had heated up and the plate got blown of by one of my delta's thus shorting out the card (partially true story)....then I told them I had attempted to remove the plate from the other one to head of any possible problems....hehe:D

I found after that the best way to remove the plate is to do a few benchies first with a high vcore to warm the glue! I suppose this is why the 9800pro has tiny heatsinks on the ic's rather then that big @$$ plate!

[trifler]

i had a little accident with my gf3 ti200 when applying a zalman hp80a when fastening the little nut över a rubber ing a little resistor came of. Though i was able to solder the little sucker back on. i hand a tremendeus luck.