Hardware Discussion Thread

[DatKid20]

(08-26-2015, 12:48 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: The Nvidia GT 210 is a shitty card. Got it from a doomed computer in our lab, and it runs fine under Windows, but refuses to boot into Hackintosh 10.10.3. I was really trying not to buy a new GPU......

Why not use IGPU?

[KHg8m3r]

A core 2 quad's iGPU isn't supported either by Hackintosh

[Xtreme2damax]

So I've been considering purchasing and taking a decent heat gun to the dead GTX 460. I read that's safer than baking in the oven and like the oven trick it's only a temp solution. I would take a heat gun to the gpu core and vram chips. Also read about reballing with cheap homemade kits. Probably better to just buy a new card but it's a nice skill to learn. Takes precision and patience which is something I'd have to work on. I've been thinking of learning skills or just improving on existing skills that would benefit me and lead to money making ventures. Become a backyard tech or mechanic and charge a bit less than shops typically would. Of course I would ensure I would know what to do and how to do the work beforehand prior to digging into anything.

[KHg8m3r]

I did that on my PS3, had to reheat the CPU. Works fine now

Got a GT 740 from BestBuy, works like a charm now

[Xtreme2damax]

^ That's cool. I wonder how time consuming reballing is besides the difficulty of it. What would I need that can be had cheap or homemade to get the job done? If vram chips can be reballed, resoldered or hell even replaced with the same amount of vram or customize it with more vram. I've heard of people customizing their gpu and soldering on new vram chips. So I could have myself GTX 460's with 2GB or even 4GB vram. I just wonder what the effect on performance in games would be using an old gpu, customising and installing new vram chips on it?

[KHg8m3r]

No idea. But when I reheated my PS3, i took the motherboard out of the case, and propped it up in the four corners with cardboard, and then turned the heat gun on low and slowly heated up the board around the area I was working on so that when I switched to high it wouldn't crack the board due to thermal differences.

[Xtreme2damax]

Ah. I watched a video of someone taking a heatgun to a gpu core. They put a thin layer of tinfoil on, flux and a piece of solder. Cranked heat gun to temp. I'll look around for a low cost kit to do this. Reballing sounds like a pain, very fine precision needed and a stencil of the chip with the usual equipment. I like the thought of replacing vram chips but that might mean modifying the bios to do. I'd want to get defective hardware on the cheap to practice, not try on my own hardware.

[admin89]

GTX 750 costs $100 , 3times lower power consumption (max temp on load = 65 degrees celsius) and it's faster than GTX 460 . Why would you need to buy a heatgun ?

[AnyOldName3]

Last time I tried reflowing something, I got bored of waiting after about 5 minutes with the heat gun on low without solder melting, and so turned it up, and the circuit board started to boil before the solder melted... so that was a good end to that pendrive, and a good way to find out that evaporated circuit board is one of the worst smelling things humanity is capable of creating.

[ExtremeDude2]

You have never burned hair.