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Oven Baking a R9 280X

Sounds like music to my ears man. I have seen some incompetent and idiot people esp in the HDD recovery. I've used todo this for 4 years with replacing PCB's, swapping out MCU's or reflash a donor PCB with the right firmware and such, but people usually reside to datarecovery as a last resort. The people from usual the PC repair shop had the balls to open up HDD's and fiddle around why it's clicking, or why the HDD is not properly spinning up, making future recovery just obsolete.

Testing a GPU that had the solder issue was really simple. Put the laptop or GPU running, and start 'softly' bending the PCB here and there. If the thing boots out you know where the problem is.
 
Linus on YouTube has done a few videos on baking dead cards.

He has even worked with Louis, the other Youtuber linked above.

Bottom line, it is a hack not a repair.

But sometimes, for some reason, it works.

As the old saying goes, “Even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. (Or once a day if it’s a 24 hour clock.)”
 
it bred a shitton of "PC repair specialists", who's only real skill was to be agile and endurable enough to circle-jerk a hot air wand for 10 minutes.
Next time just say what you really mean! LOL!
 
He's against it because it's not repair.
When you repair something properly, there should be an expected reliability period, which you perceive as "repair warranty" on a piece of paper at the end.
Even if it's non-professional self-repair, it should still follow the basic human logic. I bet you don't patch your leaking sewage pipes with dried cow shit and bubble gum, even though it might work in 30% of the leaking pipe cases. If a passenger door in your car won't close, you don't use a rubber-band-to-the-driver's-door hack as a permanent solution.
With "baking", results are unpredictable at best. You may either throw your card into remission for a few days, weeks or months, or you can immediately kill it.

In late 2000s, when this "baking" craze has took off with great speed(due to 8000/9000-series cards dying like flies), it bred a shitton of "PC repair specialists", who's only real skill was to be agile and endurable enough to circle-jerk a hot air wand for 10 minutes. "Baking" and "reballing" became a universal remedy for any GPU/Motherboard/Laptop problem, regardless of the cause: first you bake it, and if it won't work - reball it.

I make the majority of my living with component level repair, and I can tell you an awful lot of ridiculous stories about baking.
About once or twice every month I'm getting either an ASUS Zenbook or any other ultrabook w/ most of its components soldered on motherboard, that was previously "repaired" or "unsuccessfully repaired" in various small workshops in Kiev. Some of those have faulty soldered RAM or VRAM, some of those had trivial backlight issues, but what was the first thing those "repairsmen" did? Of course bake the fucking GPU or the PCH! Any AMD-based HP envy laptop comes pre-filled with solder flux and remnants of aluminium sticky tape. Some managed to charge customers upwards of $150 for a GPU "replacement", even though the original GPU corner standoffs were still intact.

Best case scenario - the chip stays alive and all I have to do is clean the shit out of it beforehand, and then eliminate the original problem and do some thorough testing. Worst case - they mercilessly kill a perfectly functional GPU for no reason and the customer still has to pay me for diagnostics.

Just last month I had a Dell Precision M4600 which only needed a power jack replacement, but some dumbass thought that random shutdowns were caused by a malfunctioning NV Quadro GPU, so he baked the shit out of it. Now it's nearly dead (some VRAM banks died, and GPU was giving artifacts even after VRAM fix), so after the trivial jack repair I had to remove the GPU, leaving the customer only with Intel HD graphics (though, he was very happy with improved battery life).

I also have an entire collection of GPUs which were tortured by baking, while the real problem of "no image" or "artifacts" was totally unrelated to the GPU.

So, as a professional I don't give a flying fuck if baking helped some people to prolong their GPU life. All I care about, is that sooner or later this GPU or laptop is gonna end up on my desk and I'm gonna have to deal with consequences of someone else's incompetence, starting with explaining the concept of "reflow and reballing is not repair" all the way to breaking down why do I charge so much comparing to those other guys (since I actually have to buy replacement parts and include them in my final bill).

For one thing, sewage pipes are important, so no, i would not do that. A dead old GPU is not important and hence it could be risked.

I agree with the rest though, essentially. It is a last ditch effort to revive already dead stuff that isn't worth repairing properly. That people misuse it is just people being people. So yeah judging by what you say it probably wasn't worth it that it got so popular, but I still maintain it's a perfectly good way to give an already dead, unimportant piece of electronics a prolonged life.

And I've said this before, but these days stuff don't seem to have the same problems the old Geforce cards had, so it's likely never a solution to anything anyway.
 
As the old saying goes, “Even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. (Or once a day if it’s a 24 hour clock.)”
You lied, I unplugged my digital clock and it doesn't show anything :rolleyes: :p
 
I've baked a dead 570 and it continued to work for many many months after, I eventually gave it away and didn't hear about it dying, but yes, it is a last ditch effort for a card that is otherwise a paperweight and tbf the results of people who have been in that position and done it speak for themselves, it does work on a lot of occasions. If it's dead bake that bitch!
 
You lied, I unplugged my digital clock and it doesn't show anything :rolleyes::p

The saying predates digital clocks.

In fact, it probably predates AC electrical service.
 
Next time just say what you really mean! LOL!
Not that :slap:
What I meant, is sitting at the desk and warming up the GPU in circular motion with hot air rework station, but the intellectual and physical requirements for what you thought I meant are pretty much the same :laugh:
 
Sorry about the delays, here are more news.

The HD6850 that I bake was in fact working before the baking, so when it worked after baking was a sign that I did not ruin it.

I got the memory pads and Artic MX4. But I proceeded to oven baking it, I could not wait to test it. I'm writing from the R9 280X right now, haven't tested with boinc or any games yet. I do notice the flicker in Windows 7, every few minutes. So, maybe the baking has done nothing and the card is in the same condition.

Before I test a video game, I will apply some Artic MX4 to the CPU because while installing the latest AMD driver, only the CPU had load and I noticed the flicker. Also, here are some screenshots from GPU-Z

Many thanks for all the replies
 

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My OG Phat PS3 got baked at least 6 times came back every time until I left it in too long but I fixed 2 other PS3 for YLOD with baking.
 
I am tempted to try it on this DOA R9 285.
 
Ok, good news, I could used the card for 10minutes in: boinc gpu, team fortress 2, GTA V. Its seems it worked! Maybe it was the new memory pad or the baking. I want to think it was the baking :)

Also, there is 1 memory chip that does not get heat dissipation, maybe its a MSI bug, because that chip stays looking down all the time, maybe it can get "loose" a little.

I add more here more pictures of the pads, tin foil setup, and artic mx4.
 

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Cool. I'm glad that worked for you actually. Here's hoping you get a bit more life out of it.

I was pretty surprised to hear it died on you like that. I've got the exact same card and it's got no quit in it. It's been ran like a rented mule since the day it was born. 6 months of mining duty before I got ahold of it. And I've been anything but easy on it in the 4.5 years I've had it. Massively overclocked and overvolted. And put through much worse than the mining stint. Those were the easy times in comparison. Shit...that miner had an undervolted BIOS on it(and likely had it underclocked as well). Not even in the same ballpark in terms of stress on the components.

About that unsinked memory chip, I found out it makes no difference. I went so far as to stick a little copper heatsink on it to see if it was holding me back at all on my memory overclock. Didn't change anything. So I took it off. No need for it. It was going to fall off eventually anyway. It was only stuck on with a little dab of thermal paste. Speaking of which...you sure didn't go light on that stuff did ya? :laugh:
 
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