A few weeks back, my brother was given a dead graphics card by his friend, who had no use for it, as it had given up on him. It was an nVidia 8800GTX, which was leaps and bounds better than my crappy 8600GTS. It was also considerable bigger than my card.
After that was out, we put it into my computer, though it didn’t work. It flashed a few messed up characters, then turned off. We took it back out, and it just sat around for a few weeks. I had read an article saying that you could fix a dead graphics card by putting it in the oven for a few minutes, the heat from the oven melting the solder, reconnecting separated contacts. I told my brother, but he dismissed the idea, not wanting to put a card in the oven. A few days later, however, he had gone through a change of heart, and figured, “why not.”
So while the oven preheated, we took the heatsink and fan off of the card, and scraped away the thermal paste sitting on it. In it went for about six minutes. It was allowed to cool for a while, and we put some Arctic Silver (fancy thermal paste with pure silver in it). We then reattached the heatsink, and took it for its maiden voyage.
Success! The card worked. I got into the Vista desktop and noticed the fan was barely spinning on the card. I touched the side of it, and it was incredibly hot. I panicked, not wanting to ruin the new card. I turned off the computer, and downloaded drivers for it on another computer. Once installed, the card was running at a much better temperature.
It was time to put everything back into the computer, so that it could lay straight up. Here we ran into a bit of a snag, since the hard drive had a cage that it sat in. The cage was too large for the card to fit, so some impromptu surgery was in order. We took it out to the garage and cut the corner out with a massive pair of tin snips.
After cutting, the removed area had a bit of an edge to it, so I covered it with a piece of electrical tape, so as not to scratch the card in any way. Finally, I reassembled the rest of the computer, reconnecting my hard drive, connecting inner cables. For now, I’ve decided to leave the side off of the case, so the card won’t overheat. I brought all of my computer stuff back into my room and began hooking it up. I took special care to hide the cables, and the end result was rather pleasing.
Last but not least was the final benchmarking test for my new 8800GTX. Crysis.
Lo and behold, my computer could run it. I tried to take a screenshot to show on here, but it pasted into photoshop black, not showing anything. It was bizarre, but I can’t do anything about it. I went and grabbed a picture off of google, so that it can be seen, just how crazy this game is graphically.
I hope this has been an read. If anybody has questions on the details of fixing the card in the oven, please feel free to email me at Rocknificent@gmail.com
Peace,
Dave














