It's probably a brick, but you may as well try flashing it if you've got the time - worst case it remains a brick, best case it may actually fix it.

you can also try baking it

typical symptom of a card soon-to-be-dead...
baking might help for a while or kill it now, there is no winning unfortunately

Yeah that's most likely bad solder joints underneath the GPU. Don't bake the whole card, even more, don't put it in the oven at all.
Just cover the whole card with tinfoil leaving only a window for the gpu and use a heatgun at minimum heat within a distance of 5 to 8 cm from the gpu for about 2 to 3 minutes. For better results before doing it get some liquid flux and drop a few drops between the gpu and the pcb, and then cover the card and heat the gpu with a heatgun. There are many videos of this on youtube.
I've had this symptom of yours so many times and this alway worked for me, but it sure is a temporary fix, the problem might came back in a month or a year, who knows. A permanent fix would be to reball the whole gpu but that's a subject for another thread.

rick6 wrote:

Yeah that's most likely bad solder joints underneath the GPU. Don't bake the whole card, even more, don't put it in the oven at all.
Just cover the whole card with tinfoil leaving only a window for the gpu and use a heatgun at minimum heat within a distance of 5 to 8 cm from the gpu for about 2 to 3 minutes. For better results before doing it get some liquid flux and drop a few drops between the gpu and the pcb, and then cover the card and heat the gpu with a heatgun. There are many videos of this on youtube.
I've had this symptom of yours so many times and this alway worked for me, but it sure is a temporary fix, the problem might came back in a month or a year, who knows. A permanent fix would be to reball the whole gpu but that's a subject for another thread.

baking works fine if you know what your doing, I've repaired an 8800GTX, 9800GX2 and HD2900 XT by baking them

candle_86 wrote:

baking works fine if you know what your doing, I've repaired an 8800GTX, 9800GX2 and HD2900 XT by baking them

It does, but if your focus is the GPU only it's never a bad thing to avoid baking the whole card if possible. Also it's certainly a good thing to avoid heating all the capacitors and plastic parts, although modern cards use mostly polymer caps which can withstand higher temps than their electrolytic counterparts.
Either way, in both procedures given here it's only a short term fix that you get.

Thanks for your replies people. Either way I'll be trying one or the other method.
Coincidentally, I found this in German and although I don't understand it I get the gist. Exact same card too.
https://youtu.be/TZE-T6xarwQ

Very short term fix....

The first bake, you might get a few months out of it or a year, then each subsequent bake, you'll get less and less time.

Anything after Geforce FX and up to Fermi had design issues, it's not just the solder balls underneath with these cards. There is more going on.

Fuck that video ... may have worked in that case but various bad practices shown there, also says nothing about cool-down periods and oven calibration.
May as well try your luck with a blowtorch held at a distance.

cooldown period is 30 minutes, time to do it is 8 minutes, temp i forget but I've done it plenty

mockingbird wrote:

Anything after Geforce FX and up to Fermi had design issues, it's not just the solder balls underneath with these cards. There is more going on.

There was someone on this forum (maybe it was you?) that once told Geforces 6 series had bondwire problems between the silicon and the chip's pcb, so reflowing, reballing could very well be just a waste of time.

Also about that video, the card is upside down, and that's a great way to have the GPU or other heavy components to drift or even drop from the card. And if the GPU was being supported by that cooking paper (?) that's equally bad, when the solder balls get liquid it might just press the gpu against the video card pcb and make a solder mess underneath the GPU.

If the card is going to be baked, it believe it makes much more sense to do it with the GPU facing up.

no you bake it the way the video shows

How come that's "effective" contrary to the card having the gpu facing up? The purpose of baking is to do a cheap reflow which means all the solder balls should be liquid state in order to reform a bad joint. If the chip doesn't fall it can only mean two things, not all the balls reached melting point or they got stretched by holding the chips weight which isn't a good thing either.

All in all, a reball is the perfect way to go, but inaccessible to most.

rick6 wrote:

mockingbird wrote:

There was someone on this forum (maybe it was you?) that once told Geforces 6 series had bondwire problems between the silicon and the chip's pcb, so reflowing, reballing could very well be just a waste of time.

Could have been me...

It's not the bond wires... It's the solder that sits between the pads that the bondwires attach to and the bumps on the chip. The problem is twofold:
1) nVidia did a Bit-Boys with these chips and decided hardware engineering and laboratory testing were unimportant. The rushed chip designs did not allow for bumps to be placed in the right areas, which in turn caused them to overheat. The good news is, I've recently read a report by our great member Th3_uN1Qu3 from Romania that nVidia spec'd the chips' voltages too high (He was talking about nVidia IGPs but this may well apply to GPUs too), so you might be able to considerably lengthen the life of a pre-Fermi card by undervolting.

2) nVidia did not use the correct underfill for the dies. The underfill is that stuff that looks like putty around a GPU/CPU core. It's quite solid when the chip is cool, but I'll bet you didn't know that that stuff is designed to soften slightly with heat, which effectively allows the die a little floating room. When an nVidia GPU fails catastrophically, it is because the chip overheated, and because the underfill was inadequate, it did not soften and some sort of internal fracturing took place.

If the card fails only because the bump becomes disconnected from the leads, then reflowing will always fix it (Because in addition to re-flowing the solder balls that connect the chip to the card, it also reflows the internal bumps to the internal leads). If you absolutely want to lengthen the life of the card, re-balling is king.