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Today I Fixed a Dead Graphics Card for the First Time - An Amateur's Guide

I thought I'd share a short tale today about fixing a dead graphics card!

 

A few months ago, I bought a box of graphics card for the sole purpose of getting an EVGA GTX 295 for a display model (what can I say? It's a neat looking, beefy dual-GPU card and I thought it would be neat to display).

 

Turns out that all four of the cards included in the box were dead. While I didn't really need any of them to work, it was kind of a bummer that I wouldn't get a conveniently usable GPU out of the deal...

 

UNTIL TODAY!

 

Yesterday I took another look at one of the dead GPUs, an XFX 8600GT 256MB, and I noticed that the a number of capacitors had blown. With the hope that the capacitors were the only issue, I scheduled a trip to a local electronic component store, Lee's Electronics in Vancouver, purchased a number of replacement capacitors and attempted to replace the bad ol' capacitors with some brand spankin' new ones.

 

For the people who might be contemplating doing something like this, it's important to note two things about replacing capacitors, and the person replacing them:

 

1) Capacitors can be replaced with another capacitor as long as the capacitance (measured in micro-Farads or uF) is an identical amount, and the rated voltage of the new capacitor is equal to OR greater than the old capacitor. While people say you CAN use a higher capacitance in some cases, it depends on what the capacitor is being used for exactly, so for someone (like me) who is not sure, using an identical value is the safest option.

2) I am pretty amateur/bad at soldering, and even I managed to remove and replace the bad capacitors (though perhaps not... perfectly. More on that shortly.)

 

While I initially struggled to get the first capacitor out of the spot it was soldered into, I eventually managed to get a technique down of heating up the solder that was holding the capacitor legs in place while holding and gently rocking the capacitor back and forth until the legs slid out of the holes they were pushed into. The first try must have taken me a whole 5-10 minutes just to take out the capacitor, not to mention another 5 minutes of trying to seat a new one in place. Eventually though, I figured out a solid methodology:

 

1) Heat up the solder attached to the legs from the backside of the graphics card

2) Grab the capacitor on the front side of the card and rock it back and forth, pulling gently on it to pull the legs through the holes on the PCB.

3) After pulling out the old capacitor, take the replacement one and trim the legs down to a more manageable size (I trimmed them down from 3-ish centimetres to about 0.5 centimetres)

4) If there's leftover solder in the holes where the old capacitor legs used to be, heat the solder up and push the legs of the new capacitor through (making sure the positive and negative ends of the capacitor are in the right spots). You may need to rock the capacitor back and forth as you push the legs through, heating the solder to make sure it doesn't cause the legs to stick.

5) Once you push the capacitors all the way through, apply flux to the metal legs sticking through the PCB. I used a flux pen that I also bought at Lee's Electronics.

6) Finally, apply some solder the capacitor legs to secure them to the graphics card PCB.

Done!

 

I have a bit of a confession to make. I mentioned earlier that I didn't quite perfectly perform the capacitor replacement, and that's because I accidentally burnt the tip of my finger when I brushed it against my very-hot soldering iron. That, uh, sucked.

 

But! Did it work? Was there a point to spending $5 in capacitors, burning the tip of my finger and possibly inhaling some maybe-not-good-for-me-fumes because I'm not the smartest cookie in terms of workbench placement?

 

The answer is Yes! The once-dead 8600GT has risen once again to deliver pixels anew, booting into the BIOS and Windows without breaking a sweat!

 

So, that's it! Hope you enjoyed the brief story/guide of a dumb-ass electronics amateur fixing a graphics card with blown capacitors! Hopefully this is useful to others who might be thinking about trying this on one of their dead graphics cards, or at the very least they find it mildly amusing!

 

Spoiler

8600GT_Repair_720p_Scaled.jpg.f04d911b65dd7c17801af0816fb242e1.jpg

CodeMaster (Name Due for Update):

CPU: FX-8320 @ 4.6GHz | Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 | RAM: 24GBs Crucial DDR3-1600

GPU: Gigabyte GTX 970 Windforce OC | Case: Fractal Design Define S | PSU: Corsair AX860i

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13 minutes ago, RezidentSeagull said:

I accidentally burnt the tip of my finger when I brushed it against my very-hot soldering iron

im still doing that after many years of soldering, but sometimes i actually grab the wrong end like its the handle.

 

You might want to add to take photos before removing the caps for a record of polarity & size if its not printed on the PCB

             ☼

ψ ︿_____︿_ψ_   

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Just now, wkdpaul said:

The thread was moved to the Guides & Tutorials section!

Oh, thanks! Sorry for the misplacement, when I started this out I just meant it as a fun story, but I guess it kinda morphed into a semi-decent-ish guide!

CodeMaster (Name Due for Update):

CPU: FX-8320 @ 4.6GHz | Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 | RAM: 24GBs Crucial DDR3-1600

GPU: Gigabyte GTX 970 Windforce OC | Case: Fractal Design Define S | PSU: Corsair AX860i

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13 hours ago, SCHISCHKA said:

im still doing that after many years of soldering, but sometimes i actually grab the wrong end like its the handle.

 

You might want to add to take photos before removing the caps for a record of polarity & size if its not printed on the PCB

That's a good idea! I was fortunate enough because the card I was fixing had the polarity marked on the PCB itself, and I only worked on them one at a time, but this is a really good tip in general!

CodeMaster (Name Due for Update):

CPU: FX-8320 @ 4.6GHz | Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 | RAM: 24GBs Crucial DDR3-1600

GPU: Gigabyte GTX 970 Windforce OC | Case: Fractal Design Define S | PSU: Corsair AX860i

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 years later...
On 4/6/2017 at 12:16 PM, RezidentSeagull said:

Hi, can you tell how to know the index of the capacitor and voltage of it, I need to replace some of them.

 

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On 4/5/2017 at 10:16 PM, RezidentSeagull said:

While people say you CAN use a higher capacitance in some cases, it depends on what the capacitor is being used for exactly, so for someone (like me) who is not sure, using an identical value is the safest option.

To add an example of this, in a passive high-pass filter, if you swap the capacitor for a higher value one, then you've altered the cut-off frequency by lowering it. That kind of defeats the purpose of the filter

 

10 hours ago, Long_GD said:

 

If it's a through-hole capacitor like what OP replaced in their guide, it will say somewhere the capacitance and the voltage.

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I tried doing this with a GTX680 4gb, but I had less luck. 

The card wouldn't post at all, had a few surface mount capacitors missing from the back. I contacted the company(Palit), and they actually looked up the schematics and found the exact specs of the SMC's for me*

I had an electronics shop solder them on, because they're tiny and I suck at soldering...unfortunately it was only partially successful, I got an image back, but it had some serious artifacts going on :( 

*Turnaround was less than 24hrs. Pretty amazing customer service for a 6+ year old gpu that I bought third hand on eBay. Shoutout Palit!


 

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