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Anybody Oven Baked Their Motherboard?

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Making a long story short ... If anybody has successfully brought a laptop back to life by baking the motherboard, how long has it lasted?

OK, here's the long story...I have a Dell Vostro 1400 laptop with the NVidia Geforce 8400M GS video and a cuople weeks ago it started freezing a couple times, and eventually just gave me a backlit blank screen when powering on.

i figured out that the video chip was the problem, and after doing some searching, i saw that NVidia lost a class action suit for he 8400M and that Dell was replacing the motherboards (NVidia chip is on the MB). Good news...except that the deadline for filing a claim was 03/16...Bad news.

I was looking into replacing the motherboard with one that has the intel graphics instead of Nvidia, and i saw a post where somebody said to bake the bad one in the oven. i already had the mb pulled out, and when you have nothing you have nothing to lose, so i stuck it in the oven at 385 for 8 minutes.

Put the laptop back together, hit the power button, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a perfectly working Vostro 1400. for how long, though? it's been 3 days so far.

So...back to the question, if you have baked a motherboard or video card, how long has it lasted?

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That is pretty close to the melting point for solder. If the problem was a cold solder joint (cracked), I guess bringing the temp up could work, but it could also cause components to detach if there is any stress at all. Some of the other components on the board might not take being heated like that.

If it were my motherboard, I would have check the solder points for the graphics chip.

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Generally it last a couple weeks tops, the best method to a diy graphics reflow is using a heat gun, set to about 600f with card board covering the whole mobo expect the gpu and heat it up 10 minutes. Also a laptop cooler will help prolong that graphics lifespan

I've never done any soldering, but from what i gathered the solder points are the problem but they are under the GPU on the mother board.

As I did more reading, some while my board was baking, i did see that the knowledgeable people were using a heat gun to do the reflow. I guess the oven baking is "reflow for dummies" (like me) but then I also saw some people who were wrapping the laptop in a blanket so I kinda feel superior to them (haha).

Ehhhh....I hope i get more than 2 weeks out of it. i got the Nvidia upgrade at the time thinking i could do some gaming, but I don't use it for games anymore so maybe it will last for a while. It went bad right after I had been using the Fallout Vegas GECK on it for a few days. I didn't think that was GPU intensive but it probably is.
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Well, you were right. I got 4 weeks out of it and it's bad again. I wasn't doing any graphics heavy stuff so i thought it might last longer. I guess I'll just have to replace the motherboard.

Ari3sgr3gg0 said:
Generally it last a couple weeks tops, the best method to a diy graphics reflow is using a heat gun, set to about 600f with card board covering the whole mobo expect the gpu and heat it up 10 minutes. Also a laptop cooler will help prolong that graphics lifespan

I have baked them in the oven both HP and Acer and in the oven you get an even reflow of any other chips on the board besides the graphics chip.
I have had stuff working for a year already that I sold and no complaints
Motherboard Guy
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