It's no secret that we're a fan of eccentric repair stories here at Tom's Hardware; we've already had classics like a dead RTX 5090 with a cracked PCB being revived, and an RX 7800 XT that was saved after a spoiled reflow attempt. Today's tale is no different — in fact, if anything, this is perhaps the most we've seen one of our persistent GPU repair wizards struggle with a job. Spoiler alert, it works out at the end, but this RTX 4080 Super almost never posted, despite everything being thrown at it.
Tony from Northwest Repair got his hands on an RTX 4080 Super that he couldn't repair — not for lack of trying though (as you'll see), it was simply broken beyond saving. Our intrepid repairer, therefore, salvaged the working core and VRAM from the 4080 Super and brought in a donor PCB... which is actually a core and memory-less RTX 4080 non-Super. The discrepancy doesn't matter for a master like Tony. "Board looks identical, so should work," he says, and continues with the repair that will involve taking a 4080 Super core and mounting it on a standard 4080 board. A new VBIOS will be needed for the GPU to accept its identity, so the BIOS chip will need to be swapped as well.
The repair starts with flattening the donor PCB since it came from China, where it became severely warped in the process of stripping it off its core — something very common in the region. It was put on a custom heating plate with weights on top that should help straighten it some degree (no pun intended). After that, the soldering job begins. Tony casually solders the 4080 Super core onto the 4080 board in a beautiful montage, along with the memory modules and the BIOS chip, all while the PCB is sitting onto the heat plate, slowly leveling itself.
One sponsored thermal camera segment later, the GPU fails to post despite showing positive signs of life when its data lines were checked prior. Tony ran a memory test, and it pinged two chips as the point of failure, but just to be sure he took off the core again to check whether it's sitting flat first. Sure enough, one of the solder balls on the core was much larger than the others surrounding it. Our repair guru wasn't interested in the why-s or how-s, so he just went ahead and reballed it. Unfortunately, it still didn't work, though the culprit identified itself right away: two data lines weren't connected to the core.
Upon closer inspection, the solder balls under the core appeared as if they weren't soldered, which would explain the missing data lines. Taking off the core once again confirmed this notion, as the bottom left and right corners of the solder pads were not in contact with the core. These corners were at a lower elevation compared to the middle of the core, which is sitting higher due to the PCB being warped from the start; the weights didn't work. In comes new weights directly on the core itself, but they change nothing. Still, no post — even after thoroughly cleaning the interconnect to rule out the riser cable.
Tony goes back to the flagged memory chips from earlier, which are known to be fully functional, and now wonders whether that area of the board is also uneven. The weights make a return and after some tedious back and forth — and a Ron Swanson throwing his TV in the dumpster clip classic later — the card finally comes back to life. Usually the repeated heat cycles can warp a PCB but since this was one was already warped to begin with, it perhaps had the opposite effect.
Regardless, Tony ends the video by revealing that this was one of thirteen cards that he needs to repair, all awaiting donor PCBs of their own, while asking Chinese underground labs to figure out a better way to rip cores off GPUs that doesn't damage the board. We also find out that this was an Asus TUF RTX card at the end, and that Tony somehow pulled off this miraculous repair job in just one night. While the video makes it all look super entertaining, keep in mind that a task of this caliber would require amazing skills and almost Herculean levels of perseverance.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
