First post, by fool
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I have these two non-working cards: Diamond Viper V330 and Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS
Award BIOS gives me 1 long + 2 short beebs. I have checked caps and missing components but looks fine. First I just tried resoldering with hot air blower without positive results. What I got was short circuit under Geforce 2 GPU.
As those are worthless in the current condition, I decided to reball GPU BGA chips. Never done that before, I have only soldered & repaired thousands of BGA chips in previous life. So how hard it could be? Let see... This is just for hobby, I don't expect great success. 😃
I have a chinese hot air blower and a good Weller solder station to work with. Sadly I coudn't take pictures from this section.
As I don't have base heater, just gave a good hot air warm up on the back side, then turned the board around and heated GPU slowly by increasing temperature until GPU was removeable.
GTS had a LOT of non-wetting (at least they looked like) pads on both sides, Riva 128 had only a dozen of them. I hope those open solders are the root cause.
Next I added some flux and slided soldering iron tip around to get all of the pads wet, same thing on GPU pads. After all pads were coated by shiny tin, removed it with solder wick.
Yet I don't have any solder balls and stencil to perform reballing. After board pads were clean, I could measure pitch which is 1.27mm. Some chart (found on Google) advised to use 0.76mm balls on 1.27 pitch, so that's what I ordered. Also 1.27 pitch reball stencil ordered. Total: 8€.
Now I just have to wait orders to arrive... Then I will update the story and result, with pictures of course.
Toshiba T8500 desktop
SAM/CS9233 Wavetable Synthesizer daughterboard
Coming: 40-pin 8MB SIMM kit, CS4232 ISA wavetable sound card