WHY Gigabyte Cards are Cracking

hi everyone how's it going my name is Andrew I run Wasatch Electronics we are a repair business that specializes in graphics cards and by we I mean it's just me I'm the owner and the technician I've been fixing graphics cards for about the past two years and I've been doing electronics repair for about the past seven so I definitely don't know everything when it comes to graphics card repair but I've fixed probably 150 200 cards somewhere in that range at this point if not more and I'm constantly repairing more so I do feel like I know quite a bit and I'm also a part of a few communities that have amassed quite a bit of knowledge about graphics card repair so I've got a lot of knowledge as far as actual repair goes micro soldering graphics cards all that stuff and a lot of knowledge as far as graphics cards go in general and knowledge that's come from others so I I wanted to go over some of the current controversy with gigabyte and why these gigabyte cards are cracking in this video I'm going to cover a handful of different subjects I'm hoping to fill in some gaps that have been left by the videos and articles that are already out there on this same subject so we're going to cover the gigabytes cracking at the Locking tab we're going to cover other cards cracking screw holes cracking and screw hole placement pcie Lane cracks I'll show you guys the gigabyte 3080 and 3080 TI Trace View I will talk about what is involved in actually repairing these cards and then we'll talk about a couple other related issues as well so let's start by looking at a few of the current videos and articles that are out there Jay's two cents has a video called These gpus are cracking and the company refuses to warranty them Lewis Rossman has a video Northridge fix has a video and then we have articles from Tom's Hardware this one's called gigabyte RTX 30 rtx40 series GPU pcbs are reportedly cracking there's an article from Guru 3D and there are other countless articles as well as other countless videos from creators on YouTube or other video platforms I want to kind of correct some information that's in those there's a lot of missing stuff and there's a lot of incorrect information in these articles and videos so I want to kind of fill in correct and add a bunch of information to what's already out there coming from a more Tech and repair aspect as opposed to just an entertainment aspect let's take a look at some cracked gigabyte cards this is a 3090 Eagle PCB and this is the area where they usually Crack by the Locking tab it goes up here where I believe this and gate would be we got a couple resistors a couple capacitors and then the screw hole right here so the crack usually comes right off of this area and it can even extend up here all the way to the screw hole and even past that on the other side but I'll show some of that and explain that a little bit later this is a gigabyte 30 series you can see the crack right here and you can kind of make out if you look really close that it's going down a handful of layers about halfway through the PCB and it's coming I can't tell if it's cracking all the way up through here or if that's just the PCB but it's cracked at least up to here this is another one I believe this is the back side I think this was a 30 70 30 70 TI something along those lines but you can see it's not very far but that's all it takes and that is enough damage to stop the card from working this is the one that's in my thumbnail this is another 30 series card you can visibly see the cracked traces this time there are three of them right here and then I guarantee this is cracked lower through other layers as well and I guarantee other layers are cracked and other traces are broken this is one that's been drilled out for the most part so all of the cracked area has been removed as you can see this one made it up to the screw hole up here so that had to be drilled out this had to be drilled out if you look really close you can see some of the traces right here that are going to need to be reattached there are many more over here that aren't currently visible actually maybe they are there's some you can see them right here in that layer they're kind of hard to make out unless you know what you're looking for though this is another one and you can see a lot better on this one the actual layers and the traces so that here there are a couple traces on this lower layer and then there are a lot more on one of those upper layers of the PCB sprung Direction This is a 38 or 30 90 I'm not sure which one that's also got a crack again on the back side you can see it's going maybe a third of the way through the PCB roughly and it's small but again that's all it takes this is another one that kind of shows how small the crack is another 30 90 that's cracked another gigabyte and the infamous gigabyte arrow and this one's the same this one's a little hard to tell I think the crack extends to about here but it might be going even further but that's a that's a pretty serious crack here are a couple photos from uh 3090. you can see this one's already been drilled out as well and if you look really close you can make out all of the traces that are going to need to be reconnected in here this is a nice microscope view here's another photo of that SIM card looks like this has already been covered up a little bit with some UV resin this is probably mid repair there are a couple other traces right here that need to be repaired and here we go here it is a little more open so a couple traces in the lower layers and then a few that needed to be repaired in the upper layers and might actually still be able to see a little bit of that crack right there so this this one was probably a mid repair needed to be drilled out a little bit more this is a card of my own this one was pretty bad this is one of the worst gigabyte cracks I've ever seen you can see the crack going up right through this area it's a little hard to make out but it runs right through here and then Additionally you can see that the crack goes right here along the screw hole and along the screw hole on this side as well here's another photo of the same card again you can see that the crack comes up this area right here this was a really bad one and right along the screw hole on that side and along the screw hole on this side as well and here is a photo of this all drilled out this is not cleaned up it's just a rough drill but this is what it takes to get rid of that crack when the crack is this bad this is how much drilling I had to do until I saw no more cracking so I had to completely get rid of all of this area I'm what maybe one two three four five six or seven layers deep over here and probably about the same on this side as well and at this point I'm getting close to the memory module over here not to mention the core and this memory module that's already up here these caps and everything that was in this area has already been removed as you can see these guys are here took those off but this is what it takes just to get started on these cards you have to get rid of all of this and that's not even starting the actual repair itself so that right there is already a lot of damage that is done to the card and that needs to be done to the card just to have a chance of getting it working again this is a gigabyte 3070 aorus that I worked on recently I replaced a couple memory modules on it this one did actually have some other physical damage so this one probably was dropped or shifting correctly in a pre-built something like that but you can see the crack on this one right here it's through almost all of the layers but luckily it doesn't go in towards the center of the board really at all so I used my multimeter and continuity mode to confirm that none of the traces were broken everything was still intact so I fixed this card I added a little custom support bracket here which is not the best but it's better than nothing and then I let the customer know to mount this card vertically or it likely will crack and if it does crack it will stop working and it probably won't be worth repairing the card still needs to be supported if it's going to be vertically mounted but that's a good way around these cracking issues is vertically Mount your card make sure it's still attached to something and then you don't have all that stress on the pcie slaw this is a card I just wanted to include for fun this is one I bought maybe a year or so ago and if you can tell it's pretty bowed over here this slot is kind of bent up obviously the fan is coming off I had some other photos but if you looked at it from this side the whole card was bowed like this here is the pcie tab and as you can see there is a very large crack across the whole thing I ended up using this card just as a donor I took the memory off and I took the core off and I think I actually sold it to a friend I didn't have any pcbs to put it on at the moment and a friend of mine needed one so you can see how bad that damage is um yeah again this one was just kind of for fun this was a horrible card I actually kind of attempted a repair on it I drilled all this area out but there were just so many traces that run through here internally and on top of the PCB you can just see on top of the PCB alone all of these data lines would need to be repaired along with any other internal choices that run in this area which is quite a lot so yeah this one uh this one got the title of Parts card this is another card of mine I worked on this maybe about six months ago I believe this is a gigabyte 2080 TI if I'm not mistaken something along those lines but it had a cracked pcie locking tab right here in this corner you can see this is the little support bracket that I was talking about before it works okay it's better than nothing but you can see the jumper wire that I ran from the PEX reset pin all the way over here to the and gate that it that signal is supposed to go to it typically runs right along the bottom here you can kind of even see the the trace I think this might have been the Tracer maybe it was actually an internal choice because I probably would have just repaired that if that was the case and it had cracked it so I had to drill that out add some epoxy there I stuck this on for a little bit of support and then I ran that jumper wire if you are missing the PEX reset signal this and gate will not output and the card will not fully initialize so it will basically never fully power on it's not going to show up in your system at least I don't believe so if it does show up in your system it's not going to work so this is a hundred percent necessary and this is a 2080 ti so I don't know if this one was physical damage or what it probably was physical damage but this is just another example of a cracking gigabyte card this is the last one that I'll show that's gigabyte this was another I think a 20 series something along those lines but this one had the Locking tab completely broken off this one's also kind of just for fun I just wanted to show this so you can see these traces in here the Vias in here I think this one had two broken traces after luckily I had a schematic for this card but after a while I figured out that this gate was missing a signal so there was a 3.3 volt signal nearby and it happened to be the same one that's supposed to be routed through here coming out of this via so I luckily just ran a little jumper right there that was nice I didn't have to run a jumper all the way across the card and then I also had to run one jumper because I think this via broke so I ran that from there to the actual via or actually no there was a via right here but it was separated because the CR it cracked right along there you can see this via going straight down that one was kind of the same deal but this one was actually broken so I ran this wire ran that via down topped it off with some UV resin and the card worked like a dream so that one was just kind of a fun one I wanted to toss in so let's talk about whether this is a gigabyte issue an end user issue or a shipping issue I think it's kind of a mix of all three to be honest I think first off I've seen a lot of these cracked cards coming from pre-built PCS where the company didn't support the card well enough during shipping and it got jostled around or bumped or knocked and that's what caused the damage on the card I've seen that on a lot of gigabyte cards but also some other cards as well so that's definitely something that contributes to this I have also seen end users causing this though moving around their PCS and not being careful with their cards especially on the gigabyte cards you can see how far out the pcie Locking tab is and just the pcie slot in general if we compare it to something like an Asus PCB obviously the pcie slot has to come out so far like this is consistent over here from here to here on the gigabyte and the Asus I would assume so at least or it's pretty close if not the same but on this side you can see this Asus locking tab is super small and there are some traces that run down here so they're kind of guilty of doing the same thing that gigabyte is doing unfortunately which I think is not a good idea running traces that close to the edge of the PCB especially in an area like this but you can see that the area is so small and it's so rounded I feel like it would be a lot harder to get a crack on an Asus card than the gigabyte card with how much area there is right here if this is in a motherboard or Riser or whatever mostly on motherboard there's so much area for this to flex if you guys saw Jay's two cents video it's an okay video but you can go look at how much this PCB Flex is compared to this PCB part of that is because of this mounting hole right here this screw hole that does a lot to support the whole pcie slot and this one it's got again it's got so much sticking out like this just flexes super easily and flex is okay the problem is that this just also has a cracking issue so if it can't Flex you know like a bridge it's obviously just going to snap when there's any sort of force on it or twisting portion anything like that it's just going to break which is not good so it needs to be able to bend but the gigabytes specifically have a lot of cracking issues this is a Nvidia Fe this is an fe39d and you can see it's got kind of the same thing as the gigabyte going on here the Asus has that small tab the gigabyte has the larger Tab and the Fe is kind of the same deal over here honestly which is it's okay but it's not the best it could be better that locking tab is huge and this 3090 Fe I got one of these in maybe a couple months ago the cooler on these things is absolutely massive so I'm kind of surprised that I haven't seen more of these Fe cards with cracks over here but I think the reasoning for that is just because this screw hole is so close to that locking tab it's on the Asus you can see it's also pretty close but then I think the Asus saves Itself by not having a lot of area sticking out here it could also have to do with maybe the cooler weight something like that as well I don't actually know if the Asus cards are any lighter than the gigabyte cards but they've got something going on here that is causing these to not crack or not crack nearly as much as the gigabyte cards which is a big thing and even though they have the screw hole that close so I think it's the combination of having the big locking Tab and pcie area and that screw hole so close it's really easy for the card to bend right here and that gives it an easy spot to jump to with that bend right there compared to the Fe which again has that big locking tab but look at how far away the screw hole is there's one over here but like that's not going to crack from here to here or anything that's a huge distance it's it's not going to crack through this area that screw hole is so far away it's not even going to touch anything so this area is probably just going to bend and flex a little but it's not going to crack like the gigabyte cards are right here so I think it is again kind of a mix some of it is shipping damage I've seen it on other PCS as well ones that people have built themselves they move around the PC they're not careful with it they get a super heavy cooler card like one of the bigger gigabyte 3090s and they don't support the card properly and or it's gigabytes issue in that they kind of have this screw hole close with the large slot I don't know if it has to do with the composition of their PCB and maybe what it's made of or if there is more or less copper in this area which maybe makes the card weaker but a big problem as well is that they are running traces through this area so obviously the pcie lanes are down here but there are so many traces that run right through here which I'll show in just a second in this area that is just they're a lot they're run literally right through here which is so close to kind of a pivotal point of the board and when that cracks it's done for again Asus is kind of guilty of that same thing I don't know about Asus layers unfortunately I don't have the layer view of their of their cards but you can see a couple traces running right through this same area I am not a PCB expert I don't design pcbs or anything one day I would love to do some of that work but I have yet to I just from a repair aspect and and taking in a lot of these cards looking at a lot of these cards being in this kind of world it just seems like not a good idea to put these traces in an area where it's going to slot into a motherboard right here and there's going to be weight on this that just seems like a bad idea to me so hopefully that's something that will change in the future um you can see on the Fe there aren't any visible there's like a there's a plane right here whatever that is maybe ground or power or something but I don't see any traces running through right there but I guarantee there are probably some I don't know how close to this corner or Edge they come but there are definitely some that run probably through this area down to the other side of the PCB so I think they're all kind of guilty of it gigabyte kind of just has a poor design in my opinion but it is also kind of a mix so I don't think we can put a hundred percent of it on gigabyte some of it is physical damage but I also think that physical damage comes as a result of the PCB design that they've chosen I don't think it's right for them to deny warranties because of this issue now some of these cards of course that are damaged and the cracks are super bad I don't think there is a doubt that that is just a user issue regardless of the regardless of the build of the PCB I've seen Asus cards cracked I haven't seen any Fe cards correct they probably exist out there but even though they're pretty rare I've seen Asus cards cracked and like that's that's got to be user damage there's no way and there are certain gigabyte cards some of the ones that I've shown have to be user damage I think even one that I pointed out was user damage there's no way that it is not but up to a certain point I think they should be covering these warranties because it's to an extent a design flaw like just the way that they designed this there's nothing in their manual that says hey you need to support this card properly that's the other thing that these manufacturers need to start doing is including some sort of support I I wouldn't be so mad at them if they included a support and said hey if you don't use this support it's going to void your warranty because not necessarily because this design issue but just because the coolers our coolers are so heavy these cars are getting so large the back side can only support so much so you need some sort of front end support I know that I wish I had an image saved to this maybe I'll toss it up on the screen maybe not but there are some older cards that used to back in the old days I never had any experience with them myself but I've seen them they exist the cards had extra kind of a support bracket on the front and you would also screw that into the PCB into the PC sorry to help support everything that would screw into your case and that would kind of help support the front of the card and back then cards were not big at all so that's really something that we need as these cores start to produce more heat the cards use more power so we need bigger coolers these cards need some sort of support at the front I know that a lot of people buy third-party supports for their cards but that's something that could be included by the manufacturer and then I wouldn't be so mad at them for being like hey you need to use this because if not there's a potential to damage to your card if you're not using it we're not going to cover this under warranty excluding a lot of details there a lot a lot of other things that could happen you know that's still kind of a shady area but I think that would be a good start is getting supports built in for these cards or supports coming with these cards and in hopes that people will actually use them now let's go ahead and take a look at the trace view this is the trace View for the gigabyte 3080 Eagle which also covers the 3080 TI eagle and I think one or two other other cards they use the same PCB they just have different coolers so what you're seeing right now is the top layer and this is kind of the area that gets cracked let me pop in the bottom layer as well so you can see this is where the Locking tab sits is kind of right here it's not going to show because there's nothing there but this is kind of that area if I am able to zoom in a little bit here oops this is what I showed earlier this is where that and gate would sit if it was populated if we go back to here you can see so this is kind of the area that it would crack in this this general area right here right across here and already just with the top and bottom layers you can see some stuff that might be broken in here luckily because this is not connected it's not really a big issue so you don't really have to worry about that but there is a VR right here that comes from again probably another slot over here so this probably connects to something across the board but that comes up goes over to here and then that's going to go to another part of the board that if the crack comes down this way that's going to get cracked and that's just talking about the top layer if we move down to Layer Two that's just a almost a solid layer Layer Three is where we start to see a lot of issues if I overlay this you can see all of the cracks all of the traces sorry in this area if your crack extends just up to here you're cracking one two three four five five traces up to right here if it's cracking any further you've got another one two three four five six seven eight nine ten traces up to here that's 15 already one two three four five so another 20 traces all the way from here to here so if you're cracking close to that screw hole that's 20 traces already that need to be repaired and then there's another three four five six or so right here and this is the issue with it also cracking by the screw hole like in that car that I showed earlier so if it cracks by the screw hole there are six seven eight nine ten all these traces right here coming right off of this screw hole that you're gonna have to repair and they are super super small so they're not easy to repair by any means and this is layer three so it's pretty likely that if you've got a crack you're going down to layer three and these are going to be cracked now layer four is also a solid layer layer five is one where we get another couple traces in one of the other photos you could see these uh one of the one of the photos that had the PCB it drilled out you could see these These are the larger choices so this is actually where that via connects to is one of these larger traces over here and then you've got these they run across the board but these are going to get cracked if you have a deeper crack on layer five these are all going to get cracked so luckily these are easy to repair they are larger I guess it's more of like a almost a plane not a trace but they're a lot easier to repair than the other ones but nonetheless they still have to be repaired it's just another thing to be fixed let's look at layer six layer six is pretty solid there layer seven is pretty solid there this could crack and you might have to fix that I'm not actually sure if that's uh on power signal plane though I actually don't think it is so you probably don't have to worry about that one layer seven and layer eight so now we're kind of getting into the territory of if your card is cracked on the back side you can have cards that are cracked on the front or the back or both I've seen both so the back side has got another set of traces if you're cracked on the back side here are one two three four five six seven eight I don't know I can't count eight traces right here in this area and then a power plane right here that's probably gonna be need to be reconnected possibly I'd have to look at what that goes to and so that's layer eight that would either be a really deep crack or a fairly shallow crack on the other side I think there are 12 layers yeah 12 layers total so that's one two three four five through so that would be the equivalent of layer five from the front we look at layer nine not much layer 10 here we go here's where we start again into some not good territory again this would be layer three from the back side so this is the equivalent of this layer three from the top side again same thing lots of traces the cracks from the back you got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten another 25 30 traces right here to repair so there are a lot and again they come up by the screw hole so if you crack by the screw hole again that's just more traces and it can crack at the front or the back on the screw hole as well I've seen all different combinations let's check layer 11 okay layer 11's got not much and I already showed you the bottom the bottom uh it doesn't really have much it's got maybe this guy right here if you get really unlucky so um yeah all in all if you have a car that cracks on the back and the front you've got layer three and layer 11 oops sorry layer 10. that's a lot of choices to repair maybe what 40 50 even 60 possible traces in there depending on where your crack goes if it goes up this area you might have a couple extra if you go down right through here depends on how far it goes and how deep your crack is and which side it's on either way you've got a lot of choices to repair not only that but you have to figure out where these go let's talk about what it takes to actually repair these cards there was an article out there that somehow got the idea that it was fairly easy they ended up changing their minds luckily and they edited the article these repairs are not easy you need certain levels of know-how you need schematics and or Trace views like the one I showed earlier and you also need equipment at the minimum you need a micro soldering iron you need your flux solder you need something to drill with whether that's a Dremel or a little mini hand drill you need a microscope definitely because these traces are tiny you need some uh I think I typically use 34 gauge wire somewhere around there so you need some very tiny copper wire you need alcohol you need it's just there's so many tools tweezers it's it's not something that your average person can do there is a repair.wiki uh entry on this shout out to one of my friends his name is pyro AKA Jeremy he he wrote this and it needs a little bit of adjusting we're going to go through it and fix some things but it's kind of got the got the gist of things so if you want to check that out I will have that Linked In the description let's look at the PCB again so again if we get a crack in this area you saw the amount of choices that need to be repaired so the first thing you have to do to fix this is to drill out all of that area earlier I showed you the photo of the car that was cracked all the way over to here I had to remove all of that PCB I think this is maybe the same PCB so you can see just in just in this one area this is a front crack only I got rid of all the crack I think there was maybe a tiny bit more right here but all of these have to be reconnected I ended up having to drill through a little bit more to get rid of this so there's in this dark blue color I should have made these a separate color as well but earlier you saw on the board View these traces again these all run kind of through this area these are the bigger ones that were down on what was it layer eight I think uh maybe not layer eight uh what layer was it let's see let me find it really quick layer five that's what it was these are the the bigger choices that run through here on layer five that's this one right here this one right here I think yeah just that one and then this guy and then there's another one right here so those all have to be repaired those are kind of the easy ones you also need a UV resin that's one thing I did miss you need some sort of UV curable resin and you could use enameled wire if you would like but copper wire straight copper wire is going to be easier so cover up anything you don't want that wire to touch you run your jumper and then you cover it in UV resin so it doesn't make contact with anything else so I had to do these and then all of these traces right here so there's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen six I think 16. if I counted that correctly I ended up having to drill this card out more and that's not uh including all of the traces that come off of the that are next to the screw hole up over here in this area so these are the traces I've seen some people incorrectly refer to these as pcie choices actually a lot of people a lot of Articles this is one thing that they get wrong some videos these are not usually pcie choices the pcie traces are over here they most of them run straight up to the core so these are the traces that are running through here like you have gpio 22 ADC mux cell uh PS PEX vdd enable I don't know what this one is but that one's that one's important that's the enable for PEX so you need that or the PEX rail is not going to turn on that's another this is msvd pwm vid so pwm signal you're going to miss you're going to have a power stage that has no pwm output and that's not good because if you power the mosfets without powering the pwm without powering the gate as far as I understand that could potentially result in a mosfet that opens its own gate and just 12 volts straight to the core so that could be incorrect I'm not like an electrical engineer or anything I'm better at repair than I am in electronics I'm getting there but that's always a possibility msvd PSI that's I can't remember because I could have to look that one up depends on the controller an LED blue driver White driver feedback enable that one's going to be important msvdd enable so again another enable signal you're not going to have msvdd without that and vvd pwm vid LED power brake fvd select 1v8p good that's going to be needed to power the rail that's after 1.8 volts otherwise you're going to be missing the enable signal for that one V8 enable you're not going to be able to even power 1.8 volts if that's broken and along with a lot of others this is just the ones in this area this is only I think layer three yeah this is layer three this is not including like layer 11 which is the other one that had a lot of traces on the back side and this is not including any up here on the screw hole so that alone that's already a lot of work you've got to run every single one of those jumpers you can see how small they are if you've ever seen 34 gauge wire it's tiny that'll fit this but it's it's tiny you have to run every single one of those across this crack if that's how you're going to do it and then not only that but you have to hope that it's not going to get bent in that area again and that your traces that you just made are not going to crack or Come Undone because if they do you've got to scrape all the UV resin away you're probably going to have to redo a bunch of these traces because getting to that one is probably going to cause some damage to the others so that's not going to be any fun now the other option is running some jumpers let me actually uh open a photo really quick for you and I'll show this one I didn't show earlier this was a 3080 TI that I bought a while back this had a really bad this was the one with the really bad crack and I wanted to try a different method instead of instead of repairing the traces right there because I wasn't sure about the Integrity of this and whether it would get damaged in the future again I instead drilled that all out I used JB Weld which is non-conductive as far as I understand as far as I could find on Google to fill everything in now the bonus to that is that the that keeps the structural Integrity of the PCB right here so I don't really have to worry about it cracking again in that area and then I ran jumpers instead now the jumpers are kind of ugly sure they're mostly not noticeable with the cooler on the only part that's noticeable is really this right here but it's not horrible you stick it in a PC you're not even gonna know because you're not looking at the pcie slot you're looking at the cooler so this even this if you're not running those traces and repairing those traces even if you're just running across the board this still takes a lot of time you have to compare the board view I I had to do this manually because there were no other resources so I had to figure out what every single trace was I had to look at the trace view and say okay this goes to here I had to figure out which layer the Via went to to the next layer to the next layer and then figure out the whole Trace then compare that to the board view and say okay I need to run I can run from this resistor to here or what's the shortest path I can I can run a jumper from some of them I was able to find some Vias to attach to or some shorter spots to run jumper so I didn't have to run them all the way across the board but you have to make sure that you have something on this side of the crack going to something on this side of the crack here is what the back side looks like again even more jumpers to run I think I probably had to run oh geez I should have counted them maybe 30 or so for this repair so there's one that goes all the way across the board all of these that come down to Vias and stuff like that and then not only that but then you have to check all the connections to make sure what you've done is actually completing the connection properly how it should so that's more time that you have to spend probing all these making sure that all the connections go exactly where they are especially when they're on the front and back of the PCB you got to check the connection that way that can get kind of annoying so more of a Time sink here is another photo same card and another photo of the back side so repairing these is something that's not easy at all a lot of times it's not even really feasible it's not even worth it this card in particular still has issues I've still yet to fix it and that's going to lead into the the next thing that I want to talk about which is if the card doesn't crack you're going to have cracked solder or ripped pads under the memory and potentially under the core now I've seen this across many cards I've seen this on uh MSI I've seen this on Nvidia Fe I've seen this on the Dell or HP OEM cards I've seen this on gigabyte it happens on everything and it happens from that pcie slot getting uh Twisted so the card gets twisted from the pcie slot there are solder balls under this if you guys are not familiar the memory and core are attached with what's called BGA which stands which which means ball grid array and it's just a bunch of balls on the underside they're all the same size they're made up of solder and there are a bunch of pads on the PCB and those attached to all those but the problem is if you get any Flex those balls will either take the pad off of the board which can be repaired but it's more work again and it's not super easy again you need specialized tools for that if you have the tools to do that crack repair you've got the tools to do this but it's just more stuff that you need Additionally you need hot air for doing this so you could get away with no hot air with doing just the trace repair if you really didn't want to or if you really didn't have hot air but you're not going to get away with no hot air for doing the memory modules of the course you just can't you can't so this is an example of kind of what that looks like you can see sometimes it rips pads off of the memory itself sometimes it rips pads off of the core itself sometimes it rips pads off of the PCB and other times you'll get like a good mix or you'll have cracked solder so neither pad gets ripped off but the solder connection gets broken which means sometimes you'll have a good connection and other times you won't so sometimes your card will work other times it won't work if you take the cooler off it might not work if you have the cooler on really tight it might work so this is kind of an example you can see any of these that are this like tan brownish color those are ripped pads on the memory so all of these unless you get really lucky and you happen to rip like just one or two ground pads or some NC no connection pads then you can reuse the memory module but a lot of times these need new memory modules so you can see this one's okay this one has a good amount of ripped pads that one's probably done for and this one has way too many to even be considered useful now sometimes what this can be is you can also see like the orange or tan color on here but it's actually the pad from the PCB that you're seeing so it's hard to say which is which on here these look more like the memory pads are ripped off but it's probably better to have the memory pads ripped off like this because then you can just replace the memory bank which is much easier than actually having to repair the pads on the PCB then you've gotta restore the pad you need to use UV resin on those to hold it down so it doesn't move when you're soldering and then you have to reinstall the memory module so that is a fix for these you remove this memory module you can see if there's any crack solder just by the way that the solder looks and then if there are any ripped pads you fix those that the memory module pads are ripped you replace the memory module reinstall it and the card will usually work I've seen that happen again on basically any card out there it is kind of just a downside of putting these memory modules by the slot right here I don't think it happens too much on the core if it's happening on the chords you're most likely going to see a crack because it's going to take a lot of force to get those balls broken or pads ripped on the core so you're most likely going to have a crack anyways I guess that depends on the card though and how strong the card is like maybe the aces you could get the core without cracking the pcie tab but I would think the pcie tab would probably still be cracked at that rate but either way that's still an issue I I would like to see them potentially mounting these further away because that BGA is just I don't know it's probably one of the most common repairs that I get nowadays on 30 series and 40 series cards is these memory modules this card only has one but some have three down here I had one that I just had to replace three memory modules on because they all had ripped pads on the bottom that's a couple hours of work depending on how smoothly everything goes plus new memory modules which usually run maybe eight to ten dollars a piece the the two gig memory modules which more cards are using now are even more expensive so those can be fifteen twenty dollars a piece if not more sometimes so it's expensive both in labor and in parts and it's not really fun to deal with that's kind of a side issue but it kind of also relates to the same thing so the problem as well with that is if you have a card that's got a crack there's basically a guarantee that you're going to have to re-ball and or replace one or more of these memory modules this one definitely in my in this cracked card the one that I have that's really bad I am definitely going to have to replace this memory module right here and this one right here and well or rebuild them potentially and probably the core as well so that card is actually just being used as another donor card I got an Asus PCB that was given to me by a friend of mine thank you and I'm gonna have to swap all the memory from this card to that card because that crack is just too bad it would take me too long to re-ball all of that and possibly repair some pads and swap over and and fix all of the traces it just it doesn't make any sense to do that so it's really not economically viable in most cases and it just takes too long to repair so all in all I would like to see gigabyte fixing their issue on their end as best as they can in the next redesign or whatever next PCB they have I would like to see this moved away from the from the Locking tab I would like to see the shorter locking tab like the Asus card I would like to see again I don't know about the composition of their PCB but I would like to see a stronger PCB if possible because again Asus has the shorter locking Tab and they have the screw hole but they don't necessarily have the same issue now do I think they'll fix the issue probably not I hope they will uh maybe I mean maybe they'll revise it in future in future uh revisions or well probably not future revisions of this PCB but in a different PCB a newer PCB that they make for like the 5000 series or whatever and I haven't seen I think I've seen a couple of the 4000 series cracking but only time will tell with those we'll have to see it's been about three years since the release of the 3000 Series and we've seen quite a bit but it the 4000 series haven't been out for very long so we'll have to see what those hopefully they improve it change some things again I would like to see some sort of extra support on this side either by manufacturers including a support bracket or extending the support in some way to mount it to like where your hard drives sit you know the hard drive bay or cases that come with some sort of built-in support for your graphics card or cases case manufacturers working with graphics card suppliers or manufacturers to design some sort of extra thing you can attach to your card or just designing specific cards to come with an extra bracket to be bolted into the case on that side anything like that would be a great Improvement not only on gigabytes side but on for Asus or for MSI or for NVIDIA the Fe cards or any anyone that's manufacturing these cards I would like to see that because again the bigger these coolers get the more heat these cards need to dissipate the heavier the cards get and the more weight that's put on the pcie slot and you can see like they're cooled up to here usually because you want to cool the power stages but there's not much cooling over here it's mostly from the memory and the core and then everything over here and then most of the cooler hangs off this direction a lot of gigabyte cards hang off far past their custom power cables because the power cables go to the right more so um yeah I would like to see that improved we'll see what happens I I don't really expect them to change their policy on rmas either unless some huge thing goes off but as someone said I don't I don't think gigabyte really has like a cult following like some other people do so I don't think they have a lot to uphold in the first place if you're buying cards especially 30 series I would definitely steer away from gigabyte grab something that's more solid like an Asus even though it's a little more expensive you're not going to have to worry about the cracking and the whole no warranty thing I honestly I would even grab like another card grab like a Zotac or a PNY or some I guess quote-unquote off-brand or like a more uh not less mainstream card compared to the gigabyte I would say grab one of those over the gigabyte so anyways that is my two cents on everything I hope that provides some good info I hope that filled in some gaps and provided some technical more a more technical view more repair centered view compared to the entertainment only view that some other people have provided I feel like they were missing quite a lot of info so my goal was to fill in those gaps and I hope that did that if you guys have any questions if you think I missed anything in this video please toss it down in the comments I'll reply to any of them and that is going to be it thanks for watching and I'll see you all later

Channel: Wasatch Electronics

Views: 23,156

Keywords: gigabyte, graphics card, graphics card repair, gpu, gpu repair, gigabyte crack, graphics card crack, pcie locking tab, pcie, pcie tab broken, pcie crack, pcie broken tab, asus crack, 3000 series crack, 4000 series crack, 3000 series gigabyte, 4000 series gigabyte, cracked graphics card, graphics card pcb repair, graphics card pcb damage

Id: A0Sm2fs2pL0

Length: 46min 55sec (2815 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023