When transferring the temperature from the CPU or GPU to the heatsink and lowering its temperature, we mainly have two options: using thermal paste or liquid metal, the latter however being the one that offers the greatest heat conduction due to its composition, otherwise If we place it correctly, the CPU or GPU may stop working.
This is precisely what happened to the owner of a NVIDIA RTX 3090 Founders Edition, a graphics card that stopped working after misapplication of liquid metal. If this happens to any of us, we will most likely pull our hair out until we go bald or buy a new one, as long as our pockets allow.
This graphic ended up reaching the North West Repair YouTube channel, where it worked again as on the first day, although the process was not really simple and we show it to you below these lines.
Fix RTX 3090 Dead Liquid Metal
The main problem of using Liquid metal instead of a traditional oxide thermal paste, it is its conductivity, so if applied in excess the residue can spread through the PCB producing short circuitsthis is precisely the problem that affected this NVIDIA graphics card.
The first thing Tony, the technician assigned to carry out the repair, did was to verify that the circuits were working correctly, however, the board was not emitting any signal.
Once the board was connected, he ran a test which revealed that two of the GDDR6X chips were causing problems. Once the problem was identified, he proceeded to disassemble the affected memory chips as well as the processor to clean up any traces of liquid metal that had spilled onto the PCB and gotten under them.
To disassemble the processor and memory modules, he used a machine that evenly heats the board up to 250 degrees to remove the affected components and carry out cleaning. In the video we can see the process as well as the different cleaning methods to which the processor and the memory modules to leave them perfectly clean and without any trace of liquid metal.
After disassembling and cleaning the components affected by the liquid metal, he proceeded to assemble the graphic. On this second occasion, yes showed the signalHowever, an error kept occurring in one of the memory modules, so he had to disassemble the graphics card again and resolder the module that was having issues, as that was the only reason he could have a problem Operating.
Once the problem with the memory chip was resolved, it passed the 3DMark performance test without any problems to verify that its working condition was the same as on day one. We don’t know how much the repair will cost, but it’s surely much less than what the most powerful graphics card on the market costs. RTX 30 serieswhose price for the Founder Edition version at launch was $1,599, no matter how much you charge, it won’t exceed that amount.
