Repairing a $1,500 display by holding a specific chip over an open candle flame. About a year after I’d bought my Gateway XHD3000, it started having issues. The fix was to re-flow the solder on this chip. It worked!
Repairing a $1,500 display by holding a specific chip over an open candle flame. About a year after I’d bought my Gateway XHD3000, it started having issues. The fix was to re-flow the solder on this chip. It worked!
11 Comments
The monitor was part of [the build I posted about earlier](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1fmglc3/i_peaked_in_late_2008_with_this_3way_sli_gtx280/). I lived on a little island in the middle of nowhere at the time, so taking it to a shop was not a thing. Researched the issue in forums, this was the consensus fix, and damn if it didn’t work.
This takes me back to the days when the standard advice for the dreaded Xbox 360 red ring of death was to stick it in the oven or wrap it in a blanket and run it to re-flow the solder.
This looks so cursed lmao
wait so you spent $1500 on a monitor and didn’t even have a 2 year warranty?
Yep.
When we went to lead-free solder, its thermal properties were not well understood under thermal cycling. This caused cracks in the solder balls. Reflowing it gets it temporarily working again by bridging the oxide layers it severed along with fine dendrites, which easily break again, so the fix only lasts a few months.
Add a little heatsink to that chip to stop it happening again in 6 months.
One word, r/techsupportmcgyver
Candle flame? Candles are probably more expensive than a heatgun made by slave labor from shen zhen
I am filled with an odd mix of horror and admiration. Well done
Hey u/larossmann looks like you’ve been wasting your money on all those fancy hot air stations 🙂
Sounds Legit
I literally thought you were gate keeping the name of the chip by scrubbing it out.Â