Linus Attempts BGA Graphics Chip Repair! - Rossmann Repair Group, New York City

so a short while ago a gentleman by the name of Luis Rossmann watched my video where I baked a video card and made a video response outlining what I've been ITTIA Thai buzz he sent a lot of bad words and a lot of mean things very often the issue that somebody's having when they have no video or something is today it is not an issue that you're going to fix by taking a heat gun to it by putting it into an oven by burning it so I showed up here in New York City at his shop to either get an apology out of him or for him to restate that in fact he is right and show me his super fancy soldering rework multiple thousands of dollar setup that is actually how you repair graphics cards or other PCBs properly let's find out which one of those things it's going to be okay so employees only means nothing to me so I guess we'll just go ahead and head inside look at all this stuff like Linus's paradise broken max knock-knock so here we are the way I see it bears uh there's a couple of there's a couple of options here you can either apologize and say I was right and you were wrong or there's a much more likely scenario where you show us the supercool piece of machinery that you use to properly repair all of this stuff so this is Luis say hi to the line is Tecton sparks I'm sorry for your right answer oh no no that's no problem so guys this right here is where the magic happens one does not repair PCBs in an oven one uses one of these that is to say if one can afford it how much just one of these cost at seventy three hundred dollars about seventy three hundred dollars and Louis here is gonna walk us through the ins and outs of how this bad boy works including you said you obtained a donor board do I actually get to operate it oh yeah you're the one who's gonna be putting this on that's the whole point of having you come here is the reduce my work look fantastic let's do it okay so I think we all saw this coming um he's not apologizing and he is definitely showing me how to do it the real way so this right here is a piece eh that was sourced from somewhere because you can't actually buy this stuff directly from the manufacturer that's one of your frustrations right and grew so maybe it works maybe it doesn't and then behind me we've got a PCB from a mainboard that was literally thrown and had its PCH pop off so without knowing if that works and without knowing if this works we are going to resolder this BGA chip onto that PCB I'm going to do it and it is not going to involve an oven and it is hopefully going to work but if it doesn't then that will be pretty fun yeah it'll be fun either way okay so step one is we want to tighten up these little retainers that use the mounting screw points and without ruining it too hard they use the mounting screw points on the PCB to hold it in place as securely as we as we can next we pull out this fancy-pants camera so we get a live feed right here of the solder points on the main board next step we turn on the manual vacuum right here we take our PCH we orient it correctly which I mean is there some guesswork involved there Google Image Search and try to find the gif that's above 50 by 50 pixels like I did five minutes before you came here perfect so we put this sucker on the little vacuum right there hoping that it doesn't come off there we go so we've got a ring of LEDs on the top we've got a ring of LEDs on the bottom that makes sure we've got great illumination from all angles both down here and up here and then what we've got on this display are two superimposed images so the brown version is the one below and the blue version is the one above and the idea is that we use our horizontal and vertical adjustment knobs here as well as our angle adjustment knob right here to try to align all the blue dots with all the brown smudges below them uh-huh so as soon as I aligned it there it stops aligning up there feel free to step in and correct what I'm doing at any point in time you can give yourself more lights and conceal hey there we go and zoom in and out huh you got a choice how far you can we go I honestly can't tell but you have no way of checking if it's right until you just yeah you don't know if it's right until you put it on I'm just looking at one corner at a time so you see that one's online yeah when the other one looks okay this is a pain in the ass this but really so is this pretty aligned that's pretty aligned those okay get yourself a thin layer of flux on there okay four is the next step Viva we'll need Z gloves so now we put just a line of flux just right down the middle yeah so with the flux in place we use this cleaner and wipe as you can see we are in a completely professional cleanroom environment here so now we've got to check and see if our chip moved out of alignment from messing around with it this thing messes with your eyes after a while man let me tell you are we back on I think that's actually good okay I would say this is good okay so next we move our light out of the way and we actually lower the chip whoa that goes really fat uh it's gonna suck oh okay see see right now it's touching the board once it's touching the board then you turn the manual vacuum off and then you go back up okay how you can move the camera around and try to get it to focus so you're almost in focus okay there you go so now we can see the balls I can't I can't make heads or tails of this image though you got to be kidding me here okay the point of this is just being able to see when the solder melts so this allows us to see under it enough to know when we should apply heat and when we should stop applying heat to solder the connections okay so hit me with your best shot good start then you hope that nothing blows up seriously so at this stage we're actually ready to use the infrared heating elements all around to heat the general area and then the two heating elements on the top and bottom to solder the chip to the PCB but it's not as simple as just you're good at 200 degrees Celsius in a oven which I noticed they have an oven this is high quality right here yeah I noticed you you do have computer parts in your oven was that just to make fun of me when I got here exactly um what do you do is if you want to clean them off after you're done ultrasonic it you put it in here to get rid of the moisture before you do anything like this you also have in an oven at just around the boiling temperature of water just to get rid of any of the moisture that built up in the chip suppose you get things like popcorn and there I thought I was getting my apology after all all right so what we do here is we have these profiles and it comes with some pre-programmed but they're not very good so you kind of have to trial and error it or use your experience or share share online to figure out what exactly the temperatures are for the period of time and the ramp up and ramp down for each of those three heating elements and then once you've got a profile you press Start and hope nothing catches on fire and hope that the solder melts so once they melt if the profile is set to run a little long we can manually stop it and then start a manual cooling cycle in order to cool everything back down to a reasonable operating temperature wow it's really hard to tell so is it is it is it is it melted stop so we're stopping it now we're deciding it's melted even though it's really hard to tell okay manual cooling and now you get to watch the balls dry okay it's important to dry off your balls when you're done any kind of repair on them so now that the cooling cycle is done we lift this bad boy up that all it lifts up oh there it goes then mr. shark grabs the PCB and whoop whoop come on and we put it - that was it we're not gonna let it cool down smart want to take a look at this is the part of the class where the teacher is like you know this part is kind of good but this is but your attendance is excellent the suspense you want to find that one hmm you want to look and see what it looks like sure yeah let's do it all right so let's have a quick look here so what we're trying to see is whether the balls got soldered to the pads your guess is much better than mine at this point in time let's see if it works so we're just gonna fire it up and yell oh yeah so here we go moment of truth we're gonna find out if a fan turns yeah come on baby I believe in you hmm oh we got a flash of light we've got five volt so it's powered got 3.3 volt on another test patch yep good oh yeah yes my bad luck rubbed off and we didn't fix it but test subject 17 a contributed to the betterment of our scientific knowledge in some way that Who am I kidding we didn't learn anything today but uh thank you guys very much for tuning in to this episode of how according to Louis Rossman one would actually fix something that had been if it had been damaged by you know something like micro fractures in the solder joints or whatever the case may be because remember whether it's a GP you like I very temporarily resurrected in the oven because that won't last very long whether it's a GP or whether it's something else there's a hundred things that could be wrong with it other than that and you actually have to know what's wrong with it before you can attempt any kind of repair so while I actually stand by the oven method as a way to put off buying a new video card while you save up for another few weeks if you are completely out of warranty and you don't happen to have a $7,500 rework station it is not the real way to actually fix anything and I'm glad that I got to at least try to do it properly so thank you very much for going through this process with us and being a good sport about the whole thing and thanks to you guys for watching whoa I transported back to our studio to bring you this message from videoblocks videoblocks is a subscription-based stock media site that offers its members unlimited downloads from their library that features a hundred and fifteen plus thousand stock videos a 4k + HD clips After Effects motion backgrounds and more with a royalty free license and in April videoblocks is celebrating the creative community they're providing exclusive offers and content for new members like new video content from Discovery Channel they're releasing cinemagraph and they've got more surprise exclusive content that will be released throughout the month of April right now we've got a special offer for our audience as well you guys can get a one-year subscription to videoblocks right now for only 99 bucks which ends up being about 90 percent off their monthly price and when you get a one-year subscription right now they're also throwing in a one-year audio block subscription which is a nine hundred and fifty dollar value that provides you with access to 100,000 plus royalty free tracks loops and sound effects so for just 99 dollars you get access to over a hundred thousand stock video clips on video blocks 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whether it's just their business practice in general he's got rants about me so if you're into that kind of thing he's got at least one really good rant about me and what an idiot I am so check that out and also don't forget to subscribe don't forget that if you like our videos you can hit the like button on it you can become a contributor to my cool shirt like this one you can use Amazon with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy stuff or you can even give us a directly monthly contribution through our community forum now that you're done doing all that stuff you're wondering what should i watch next maybe check out the video that started this whole controversy where I baked a video card and did manage to resurrect it however temporarily it might then handmade this gentleman Matt in the process so mad that I had to come all the way here to New York to make him feel better hopefully that's not how you feel better

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,156,603

Rating: 4.883986 out of 5

Keywords: bga, graphics, chip, repair, rossmann repair group, louis rossmann, linus, mac, mainboard, motherboard, solder

Id: Shn7LdIrViQ

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/shoopdewhoopwah]

Im astonished by how dumb Louis looks but is not.

Reminds me of this kid in our class who everyone thought called an idiot because he'd just strike f's in exams. Till one day he wanted to prove that he is not dumb. He topped the same year with A's in the end.

He did leave school the next year due to f's, but he proved his point, he wasn't stupid. Just not interested, who knows, maybe he's a genius?

I'll never forget that smart ass. Acting stupid all along, proves his point, and leaves due to lack of interest. haha

[u/mynumberistwentynine]

That was pretty neat. I'm glad that Louis and Linus were able to get together to make this video. I've actually had luck with the oven method years ago, but of course it's cool to see how you're actually supposed to do it.

[u/cylindrical418]

who's louis

[u/Michelanvalo]

That whole video was awkward as shit.

[u/toddybody]

Wow, a really underwhelming example.

I'm torn between my like of Linus' personality (and passion), and the dumb ass things he pushes on the program.

[u/[deleted]]

I remember running across this kind of thing with repairing PS3 chips. So many people either recommended using an oven or a heat gun with aluminum foil. For the price of a heat gun, you could buy solder balls and a GPU chip template to actually resolder the chip with leaded solder. It's not as professional as it should be, but it's a hell of a lot better than heat gunning it to keep it going for another month.

[u/Mentioned_Videos]

Other videos in this thread:

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VIDEO	COMMENT
Some thoughts on meeting Linus in person, he's a cool guy.	9 - It's actually way less awkward when you've seen Louis video before where he's talking about having met Linus and what they were doing off camera.
Reballing a dead horse: Q&A from my YT inbox.	2 - Louis explains why he looked like an idiot in his QA vid around here:
Reflowing dead flip chip GPUs is STILL BS!(yes, regardless of what YouTube tells you)	1 - man that original video was hard to find.

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[u/Arthur233]

man that original video was hard to find.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9aZZxNptp0&index=12&list=PLkVbIsAWN2lvpys3pHlAHXGEamiDEWiRN

[u/Hobby_boy]

Don't the BGA pads on the board have to be pasted up with solder before putting the BGA on? Also, shouldn't the board be Xrayed afterwards, to check for voids in the BGA connections?