A Brazilian technician at TriTech Informática has successfully repaired an XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card after the heavy GPU cooler caused solder joints to separate from the PCB. The repair involved manually reballing the graphics chip and restoring a damaged power rail, which allowed the card to boot correctly afterward.
Technician manually reballs GPU to fix solder separation caused by heavy cooler
The XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT uses a large cooling solution that weighs between 1.0 kg and 1.1 kg on its own. This cooler accounts for most of the assembled card's total weight, which sits at approximately 1.3 kg. The printed circuit board itself is relatively light at around 200 grams.
The technician suspected that the excessive weight of the cooler placed stress on the GPU corners during operation or transport. Inspection revealed unusual solder joints around the chip, indicating that the BGA connections had separated from the PCB. No compatible reballing stencil was available for this specific GPU model at the time of repair.
Because a proper stencil was unavailable, the technician manually placed each solder ball onto the GPU die before reflowing them. The repair also required restoring the 1.8V power rail to bring the card back online. After these steps, the graphics card booted successfully and reported normal parameters in GPU-Z.
The successful boot was verified on a system limited to a PCIe x8 link speed rather than a full x16 connection. The successful boot and normal GPU-Z readings verify that the graphics processor operates properly following the manual reballing procedure. The repair highlights how heavy coolers without adequate support brackets can cause physical damage to high-end graphics cards.
Source: VideoCardz
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