I was lucky that R9-270X lasted 5 years of daily use and hardly any dust, I remember bought that before bitcoin craze hit which drove GPUs prices crazy high. Thanks on this GTX 1080 tidbits, I'll make sure I use premium thermal paste on this. I plan to buy either Vega 64 or Titan X but making sure they are clean and pasted properly. First GTX 960 was in daily use in previous home main computer and second GTX 960 was bought second intending to use it in SLI, I didn't realize that one was dying. Found out when I did so I lost 200 dollars on that second 960 as was bought few years ago when I pulled it out of storage. All the GPUs except HD7770 was new, were ebay buys.
I fix stuff, so they will be donors for simple components and reuse other parts. It is against my morality to sell as bad without explicit details of what I did with grave warnings cannot be fixed is not sufficient enough. Especially how poorly experienced people are especially motherboard and GPUs in details of actually have failed, or holding back information hoping to get lot of money. This drives me nuts. If I did, last thing I wanted is end up finding this out same way and go asking my money back. Plus selling on ebay requires credit card. Not all people carry one, I'm in one of this.
Funny thing, I was arguing with co-worker at work and he was stubborn thinking that's great, I disagreed, since had seen youtubers that bought a bunch and was able to fix some, that it is fixable by buying stuff from ebay. I have gone through this few times and score overall I keep in my mind was zero success.
Also I sit on many facebook groups and they talk about exact same thing, they say these stuff were looked at, or ruined by people trying to fix or holding back the truth other than they sell for high prices for defective, hoping to make some money back with wrong intentions. Very anti-morally.
The true cost is needed items is tools and true cost of collecting enough same models to get good donors, is difficult and costly, and able to fix one or two is high price. Even you can't get enough donor models as you don't see that many on ebay. True stories of mine had happened. The true cost of needed tooling especially BGA rework station is needed for true success starts at 1,000 or more. Even the memory chips is difficult enough to swap.
No, you can't make do with typical 150 bucks hot air station alone, I have tried before. Needs a large PCB preheater to evenly heat this large and yes, need even larger BGA rework head to heat large package.
And getting large package like CPU, GPU are also expensive and you run the segments of good or bad parts.
Good soldering stations starts at 150 or more. Even with this, you can only go that far with two soldering handles to get 2 solder joints components but much easier with small preheater.
The major difficulty is with no-lead solder takes about 50C, even 100C more than lead solder and that can make a difference in success or failure and results in burnt, even solder just bead on and on massive copper plane in the PCB and not melt at all, and pop corned PCB/package. I know the difference is about 15 to 20C between lead and no-lead solder but in practice, reality differs.
I have been doing electronics repair starting from late teenager when I started with university's computing dept in late 1980's and I'm now in my 50's. My last job was TV tech repair and now current job is cell phone, some electronics and console repair which, are usually HDMI port jobs and simple small components replacments like mosfet ICs and small ICs. Any larger, I advise customers to send them to OEM or well experienced and well equipped shop instead.
Most of time failures lies with GPU, CPU or important chipset like southbridge or sub security/multi function for keyboard, etc die are irreparable. I did even searched everywhere on my Dell Precision 7530 original motherboard and could not find anything after few days of trying. So ended up replacing motherboard with another. Yes, remembered those youtubes? I did watched them too. I did remember Dell D600 was revived by replacing the mosfet IC and eventually blew again 1 year later.
I know of you have recapped your boards really take some effort but better with higher powered soldering stations and flux paste, but hardest ones is the SMD electrolytics if there's severely limited room where $150 hot air and small preheater is so helpful. Yes, I recapped mine several motherboards too. First one was Dimension 8300 motherboard was recapped and drove it on P4 2.8C daily at TV shop for several years.
I just only buy if the price is right and play with it and maybe get lucky but that is not often these days due to asking prices is too high for so-called scrap stuff that they think can be fixed.
Fixing if you get lucky is very fun. In fact, right now bought two bench multimeters, both are HP, 3468A on my home bench waiting for parts to come in, and 34401A that reads high and funny measurements in the transit to me. They are not too complicated due to their vintage was built in that era and eevblog has vast forums on these.
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
