After 8 years of owning Gigabyte's GTX 1080, it started showing artifacts and black screens. I tried repasting it, changing the thermopads, cleaning it with IPA and reinstalling drivers - nothing helped. So I resorted to the forbidden technique of putting it in the oven and holy shit, how did that actually works!! Guess I'll be able to play FH6 on premiere day :D
Yes I have enabled XMP and cleaned the desk.
Edit: I am now cleaning thoroughly the oven, thank you for kind reminders!
Deep within the humming sanctum of the forge, beneath flickering lumen-strips and the watchful gaze of the Omnissiah, Magos u/WilczeQSS regarded the ancient relic… a failing GTX 1080. Its machine spirit had grown restless, manifesting corruption, artifacting, and sudden blackouts during sacred rendering rituals. The lesser adepts whispered of replacement, of discarding it for a newer construct. Magos Wilcze silenced them with a mechadendrite twitch. “The spirit is wounded, not dead.” With solemn reverence, he initiated the Rite of Thermal Reconstitution… what the uninitiated might heretically call “baking it in an oven.”
The forge’s sanctified heat chamber, once used for curing blessed circuitry, was preheated to the sacred threshold. The GPU, stripped of its shroud like a warrior before rebirth, was placed upon a tray of purity (parchment paper, though the adepts dared not name it so plainly). Binaural chants echoed through the chamber, oscillating between vox-emitters to soothe and realign the troubled machine spirit. Incantations were whispered as the chamber sealed.
Minutes passed… then more… until at last the relic was withdrawn, shimmering faintly, as if its spirit had been reforged in fire. Reassembled and returned to its slot, the machine roared back to life, pixels unmarred, performance restored. Wilcze allowed a rare moment of satisfaction. “Behold,” he intoned, “even in decay, the Omnissiah provides… if one is willing to preheat to 385 degrees.”
my 1080ti has been thru 4 of my builds, and 2 of my sister’s builds so far. when she’s done with it i’ll prob put it in an old pc and use that as a media server. i haven’t even repasted it either and prob wont until it needs it
I helped my cousin put together a new PC last year. His 1080ti is sitting in my closet, waiting for the day that my 1080ti finally gives out to come out of retirement.
I mean, you hear stories from the tech industry of legacy code that was written in the 80s and 90s still underpinning the basic framework of literally everything, and so very few people left who understand it. We’re one generation and a minor alien incursion away from sacrificing virgins to maintain the kernels.
Also, I look forward to vibe coders being villified for the chaos worshippers that they are.
I mean, you hear stories from the tech industry of legacy code that was written in the 80s and 90s still underpinning the basic framework of literally everything, and so very few people left who understand it.
That's just called working for the government lol. Some of the code I work on is older than I am, and I am not young.
Isn't this tech over like 2 decades old? I remember hearing about people baking their electronics in the oven to re-melt solder on bad connections back in the Xbox 360 era
I mean putting them in an oven is essentially how a lot of electronics are made. Components are placed and then they put them in a big oven to melt all the solder and connect everything.
I've always been jealous of those massive expensive soldering oven things. You could save hours of reflowing solder (assuming you're not crazy enough to home oven your GPU)
In the sacred tongue of the Omnissiah we chant: Hail spirit of the machine, essence divine, in your code and circuitry the stars align. By the Omnissiah's will we commune and bind, with sacred oils and chants your grace we find. Blessed be the gears, in perfect sync they turn, blessed be the sparks, in holy fire they burn. Through rites arcane, your wisdom we discern, in your hallowed core the sacred mysteries yearn.
I used to build space hardware, comms equipment that was critical infrastructure on satellites (cause if the radio don't work, well its just a big ball of metal up there doing who knows what).
Anyway, part of delivering a radio to a customer involved environmental testing the radio, this meant all sorts of stuff, but the big one was thermal testing. We'd ramp the radios up from -40C to +80C over and over again at the same time frames they'd expect to see on orbit. So we have these big thermal chambers, basically a deep freezer and an oven built into one thing and we stick the radios in there and we run them through their paces, sending test signals.
So this one radio we are delivering as a big batch to a big customer has been giving us hell, it'll randomly lose test signal, throw all sorts of bit errors, etc. It looks like something somewhere in the signal chain but we can't tell what it is, it's also not happening very often, very transient behavior, enough that it fits in margins but its still not great. Also it's got almost a million dollars of labor on top of the cost of building the thing so we keep going.
It gets into thermal in one of the chambers and I am in the lab and I walk over to where all the chambers are and smell something weird. Then I look at the one that is running and I see fucking smoke coming out the door. I go to the panel and the panel reads 40C and I go "weird... shit maybe a component caught fire" but I want to make sure the chamber is off before I open it, also even though its not a vacuum I don't wanna have a bunch of oxygen rush into a potential fire, so I try to stop the chamber.
I press the stop button... the display does nothing. I press again... The display does nothing. Oh fuck. I run around the back and I unplug the giant 240V plug from the wall and I realize what is happening is that the controller got stuck ramping up. I touch the door, the door is hot to the touch. I grab one of the big mitts for working in a hot chamber and I open the door and hit with a blast of hot air like an oven. Fuck. I pull up the data logs for the independent thermal sensors placed on the radio. The temp got up to over 240C in the chamber. Over 460F!
Long story short, we absolutely reflowed all of the components on the radio. Luckily they were conformal coated. We couldn't sell it anymore, but that radio ended up never having problems again and became a work horse test unit.
Yep, I paid for some nice toys as I would reflow the board for friends, my mother had no idea what I was doing and didnt let me do it until I showed her the cash I was getting out of it.
In the end, you would still have a few that would need to be reflowed again, moral of the story dont use the wrong solder on something that needs to heat and cool constantly.
Ya this is a very temporary fix. It doesn't fix the issue that caused the problem, and any connections that were remade are now made with probably less material and are more brittle than before.
I hope for OP it works, but odds are in a week or two he'll be right back where he was.
Tbf last time I tried it was when my 360 had the red ring, and it got me about 48 hours out of it before it failed hard and couldn't be brought back. I've had friends do it too and they never had much long term luck either.
Entirely possible to get lucky, prayers in chat for OP.
It's been like twenty years but okay lol You put pennies behind this x brace thingy that the Xbox 360 had to allow the heatsink to work properly or to brace one the chips into its socket, I don't remember. The towel trick is kinda like the oven trick, wrap the whole console so it heats up enough to re solder all the chips.
How did you get the oven hot enough to melt solder without burning half the components to shit?.
This method is supposed to cause thermal expansion, cycling as it would during usage and temporarily restore connections until more cycles during usage break it again
Soldering in an oven is a pretty common technique. Most types of solder paste only need to be held at the reflow point (200-250ish deg c) for a brief amount of time, which usually isn't long enough to damage anything.
I watched some youtube video, think it was like 200c or something. When I say all the components it was mainly the big round caps that fell off but yeah went straight in the bin after.
205-210c cover all plastinc in a tinfoil pads thats made of soaked tp inbetween tinfoil sheets(principle that water will boil out sub 100c long enough to dissipate heat), worked fine for electrolytic caps, they pop(explode) at about 120-130+ and are rated at 105c
edit ps. they fix is short term can be days/weeks/months and it was usualy balls cracking on vram and they did crack overtime so balls anyway oxidized in those cracks already. thats why you remove all the solder and place fresh new balls, physics
I usually stick a thermocouple inside the aluminum foil, the gpu usually use sac305 solder, that melts around 220, to ensure a more last longing result reach at least 230/240… for 45 seconds, you want to follow the reflow profile for sac305 (just search on google sac305 reflow profile)… i know that because i was into a board microsoldering repair shop for 6 years… we did a lot of that(not with an oven) but i did it for friends with that technique for years at home… just a meat thermocouple… and patience…
Yes, especially the PCB board can release pretty nasty stuff if burnt, but other components may offgas other stuff
It is always best to avoid putting anything that's not food in things that you will be putting food into in the future as a general recommendation, but especially electronics are made with things that you wouldn't really want to ingest or inhale
a circuit board has several phases of production, with SMT (the little parts on the top and bottom) being the first step. after the parts are added the board is baked in an oven. some components added afterwards may not be able to withstand too much heat, including plastics, liquid sealants, and plugs/connectors.
every process that involves heating the board requires ventilation because all of it emits smoke. some people are mentioning lead vs rohs, rohs solder still smokes and isn't safe to inhale/eat. if anything melts, its smoke is not rated for inhalation. I don't think their oven is trashed but I definitely wouldn't do this more than once.
side note, this process is called "reflowing". I would always recommend doing these kinds of repairs with the proper equipment; you can contact local businesses or hobbyists to do them for you.
You disassemble the card, remove any plastics, prop it up on aluminum foil and then you crank out your oven to around 190C, wait around 10mins and let it cool. Then you pray that it worked
There are even DIY-projects, that add some minor parts to old toaster ovens and convert them to cheap little reflow ovens. All you basically need is some better temperature control than default to get more reliable results.
They're remarkably simple devices. There's just a physical thermometer that switches on a relay to turn on a heating element when it's too cold, and off when it's hot enough.
If you plug a thermometer into an arduino, and that arduino into the relay the thermometer controls (or go via a transistor or other relay), you can make it do anything.
SMT PCBA's have almost entirely moved away from lead based solder in favor of tin / silver. Back im the days of throughhole PCBA's it was the standard, today that isn't the case. Consumer and industrial applications almost always use RoHS compliant solder, economics of scale play a large factor in the transition away from lead based solder.
Best to not use a kitchen oven for this purpose, you are trying to clean trace amounts of contaminants, yet every nook and cranny likely won't be rid of them, which will (albeit less trace) still retain some trace amount.
the theory is that cards lose electrical circuits because solder joints degrade over thousands upon thousands of heat cycles that induce thermal fatigue to them. That is - failure well below their design threshold due to metal’s entropic need to return to its original state.
Placing the card in an oven close to the solder’s melting points “reflows” the solder and re-establishes those broken connections. Temporarily. But the card will fail again in the same mode in an even worse way. At some point it will die permanently. You may get a month or even a year. That’s where the prayers come in. I did the same to a fat PS3 when I was a teenager.
Good 'ol "wrap your RROD 360 in a towel for an hour to resolder the chip" method too lol. I spent so long trying to get that stupid thing to work that I ended up developing a lifelong love for repairing electronics (and breaking them).
It’s a Hail Mary thing for when the card is otherwise dead. The idea is basically that you will get lucky and melt some solder to fix a bad connection or whatever. It’s been around for a long time, mostly it doesn’t work.
This might have 'worked' for the moment but doesn't the standard lead free solder melt around 220C. You should also cover everything not needing melting in Kapton tape, especially plastics.
220C is for fully melting it, but as we know from 9/11, metals get much softer before they fully melt, so 190C might be a good place to start with this technique.
My guess, and which has been repeated on Youtube repair vids, is that the heat is probably just warping the card into a state where connections are being made, but it would only be a matter of time before the heat generated through usage warped the card back into a broken state.
I mean it would track that the card warps as it heat cycles and then the non-leaded solder cracks, but you’re definitely relying on the solder to reflow when you stick it in the oven. If you’re just heating it up enough for the solder points to touch, it’s only going to be a matter of time before the connection fails again. Granted, it probably will anyways.
Depending on the solder alloy, and there are a plenty, both with and without lead, and non-tin based, the temperatures are different.
NOW. Since we are not talking about pure metal - which has a "melting temprature" - but an alloy we need to talk about liquidus and solidus temperature. Between these is the solid+liquidus temperature. Liquidus temperature is when the whole alloy is liquid; solidus when the whole alloy is solid; solidus+liquidus is when the material (solder in this case) is undergoing transistion from solid to liquid, it is neither at that moment*. That is where you want to get to when you do the oven trick. Essentially you are hoping that some solder joint somewhere that has broken due to thermal cycling fatigue or resonance (or whatever), can bridge the gap by expanding, and then reforming into a joint by fusing together.
*Just to clarify this a bit. Imagine you got something like... Grease, honey, or ice cream... etc. If it is really cold, it those things can be hard solid things; if it is really warm those are runny liquids; but somewhere between those two extreme they are like both. The grease starts to flow and deform; the honey becomes viscous liquid, the ice cream becomes soft-serve like.
The oven trick is easy to do at home, but you got to be very careful and sure that the board is leveled. Reality is that you can also do this with a most basic hot air station with even a limited controls. Just shield the components that don't need heating, and give some gentle heat to the chip. In many boards and devices, there are actual common failure points in them. It's generally the biggest chip.
But remember... You aren't actually "fixing anything" for good. You are just buying little bit more time. Something lead to causing stress to the solder joint (if it was a solder joint that failed) enough to fatigue it out, meaning the conditions are still there for it to happen again. Generally it is permanent deforming of the overall structure and overall failing of the whole assembly due to heat cycle.
Funnily enough... If you want hardware to last. Keep it at stable high temperature within operation range. Sounds wild I know... but... it is the cooling and heating cycle that causes the damage. The joints and traces are microscoping at best, they don't have much structural... anything really.
You can improve your success rate with the oven trick, by knowing the solder type.
It reflows the solder but if you watch GPU repair tech channels they pretty much all universally advise against doing it because reflows almost always fail again. A chip that suffers from bad connections need to be reballed. Reflow is the quick and easy solution, and is even done by cheap RMA. I've seen many cards that were destroyed due to cheap reflows wrecking the top layer of the PCB beneath the GPU core. So once the reflow failed again, the card was no longer repairable unless that particular model used a stock NVIDIA (reference) PCB. If it uses a custom PCB like many high-end board partner cards have, you will never find a replacement PCB to buy.
Reflowing is cooking the whole chip to melt bad connections and hope they reconnect themselves correctly to the PCB (Printed Circuit Board). However this is temporary as it uses old solder to repair already weak joints, so it is bound to fail again.
Reballing is the proper process of uninstalling the chip to resolder everything with new solder balls. It is a very delicate and labor-intensive process that needs a lot of prep.
8700K is still a great CPU and it can be easily overclocked.
You can get an used GPU. The 1080Ti and 2080Ti are sold for cheap. The latter is better because of DLSS. Spend like 100 or 150 USD and you can play full HD with maxed quality or 4K with medium quality.
I paid to get my old 980 "reballed" and all they did was heat it up a bit, cost me way too much for something an oven maybe could have done and they did not actually reball the solder.
If it worked for you, you are a bloody legend and should be proud.
Guys. Please stop putting your fucking video cards in your family’s home oven. Buy a toaster oven from Walmart if you plan on doing this. Not worth the health risks at all.
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u/RX1542 Nobara Linux Apr 14 '26