douglar wrote on 2025-09-12, 00:21:I'm curious to see how that goes. I've got that Radeon 9800 with display issues I need to address. I'm still hoping that it's a power delivery issue, but in my heart of hearts I feel like it's memory.
Well, I made some progress yesterday.
I was lazy, so I re-placed U67 since I was not in the mood to reball the existing memory. All of them are the usual K4D26323RA-GC2A from Samsung. Hercules used a strong strong strong adhesive to mount these memory coolers. I had to really go to town in terms of warming them up to get them removed. And even now the chips are not clean.
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Before changing that memory chip, the card would usually get stuck on post code 25 and the system will not continue.
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Now we get consistently trough with a beep that the GPU init isn't working properly, however the rest of the system boots. Furthermore, If I apply pressure on the neighboring IC (U66) the card gives a picture, albeit with some graphical issues.
So I assume the "bridge" cooler on that memory at some point go some mechanical stress, which causes BGA joints of both memory ICs to suffer. Next step is to de-solder, re-ball and re-solder U66, since the issue is pressure related.
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I'll get to that next week, but I'm confident to get that card going again. Will be a nice addition to the repair report thread, as it's not as "straight forward" as previous repairs.
I also noticed that this card suffered from a bad life before. There's a lot of nicotine residue on the card. Nasty.