Did another attempt on the chip. With another fresh chip with new balls. This time the mask scratched off or something as some of the traces are slightly exposed. This is definitely not a good thing as the balls can migrate into the wrong spot. I gave it a try nonetheless. This time I measured the temps on the card and it seems that i need to set the preheater to 220 C, so the board reaches 130 C. This time I got really excited as the artifacts were gone when booting, yet we still have errors. It reverted to the initial state - ish.
Initially that chip had errors MDC0 28 30 31 and now MDC0 28 29 30 31.

However, what I find interesting is that the artifacts disappeared, just like when I first booted the card when i got it. Maybe heating up the card really good made it behave the same way. I'm thinking it's not the ram. Why do I have the feeling that it's the GPU that needs re-balling and swapping the ram chips will not solve this.

Is my assumption plausible? I'm thinking of replacing the other chip with problems and if the same bits remain, then it's clearly the gpu or something in between the gpu and ram.
Thoughts?

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-04-14, 17:17:

Dothan Burger wrote on 2026-04-14, 11:49:

I remember having to deshim my 9700 or the GPU die wouldn't make contact with the cooler. Maybe something similar happened with this card.

The default thermal compound between cooler and GPU took that into account.

That compound had the thermal conductivity of a piece of chewing gum. The paste would be completely useless now, so what was it replaced with.