 God, this is really bad. Oh, this is terrible. Wait, what? There's no way this is okay. What? Why is this on? What? I just got six GPUs for only $1,700 because they're all dead. Although by the end of this video, with any luck, a couple of them will be alive. And huge thanks to Origin PC for sponsoring this. The GPUs we have here go from boots up but crashes to, I haven't looked at this one yet. So let's have a gander Brandon. Box has seen better days. Okay, it's just a loose graphics card. Excellent. We also have a variety of loose screws. That's never a good sign. If you wanna do what we did and go on eBay.com and just get it for parts GPU, make sure someone else hasn't already had a crack at it. Like this one right here, it looks pretty decent. And as far as I can tell from the description, the old owner didn't really put a whole lot of effort into trying to fix it. As for like this one, it's clearly already been used for a parts card. If we get this guy back, I will be shocked. 980 Ti for a hundred and couple bucks worth a try. First step when you have a dead GPU is to verify that it's dead. In order to do that, we have our test bench here from Origin. It's a Millennium 5000T and it is certifiably a good one. I guess we should probably make sure that this works first Brandon. Fancy. So in here we have all of the best stuff. So 12900K, 3080 Ti, good looking board from MSI and a peel. Wow. Yeah, that was a really good peel. I have to say. One thing that's super cool about these PCs is that even though it comes with a warranty, you can swap out the parts and you still maintain that warranty. I don't know if they intended you to put something like this in it, but we're gonna test it out. Well, the rest of these GPUs we just got from eBay. This one right here is Jono's. Yep. So what's wrong with it? It would kind of like disconnect. Like the monitor would just disconnect randomly. It'll do that in a series and it'll stop and it'll do it in the series again. So it like happened like every couple of hours. So I'm kind of hoping you can fix it or see at least what's wrong with it. That sounds very hard to diagnose. I don't know. Also, I've just been running for a mark on this PC and it's looking great. GPUs at 70 degrees. Everything's kind of in line with what I would expect. Yeah, the memory is kind of hot. It's at 94 degrees, but that's not too crazy. Nvidia says you can do 120. So that's a good baseline to go off of. Now let's check Jono's in. I'm sorry, Origin. You did actually do quite a nice little job of cable managing here and I'm gonna have to ruin it. We have loads of power easily available though. Thank you for running it like that Origin. I don't know, Brandon. You say it's like their system builder, but I've seen some pretty shoddy stuff system builders. That's fair. But not Origin. Yeah, not Origin. I think step one for this guy is going to be just to give it a little clean. One thing to note when blowing compressed air, make sure that it doesn't spin your fans. It can just overload the motor and turn your fan into a generator. Not great. There are apparently like diodes and stuff in this that should prevent it from killing your stuff, but either way, just don't let them spin. Wow, that helped a lot. Brand new. If your GPU seems to be dying, try out the easy stuff first. Make sure your drivers are up to date and check if your temps are okay. So we're just going to be doing a quick driver install here and then we're going into hardware info 64. It's a free program. Just install it, check your stuff. Run something like maybe a FurMark or something, just any game that you run. See if anything in your GPU temperature starts looking weird. So temperatures that you're looking for, GPU shouldn't be over about 80 and memory is normally fine if it's around 100, 120 at the highest. What you really want to look for though is that your performance isn't just tanking. So we have something like FurMark here, we can run it. And we'll see that at the start, we're getting 225 FPS. It's going to go down a little bit at first as the turbo runs out, but it shouldn't like become half of that or just completely fall off a cliff. Well, I have some bad news for Jono. He thought that the temps might've been the problem here and they aren't. I didn't think it would be. We could leave this for longer, but it's at 50 degrees right now, like there's clearly nothing wrong with the GPU temps. One thing that people almost never do with their GPUs is update the firmware on it. Even though it can fix things like what Jono's been seeing, they might've patched it like a year ago and he's just never updated it. We've done everything easy on Jono's GPU. So drivers, firmware, temps are looking good. I can't get it to crash. So that's kind of where we're at with that right now. What I'm doing is just running 3DMark with a GoPro pointed at the screen to see if it does crash eventually. There's so many things that could have been causing his problems. I don't even know where to start. Like I personally had a problem that was similar to that a while ago and updating my monitor's firmware fixed it. So like there's too many variables at this point until we see it actually crash and can go through the logs. While it runs though, we're going to test out the rest of these GPUs to make sure that they're safe to put in our system and just look for anything obvious. So first thing, we're just gonna check for shorts. It's highly unlikely that there will be shorts, but if there is and you plug it into your computer, you might blow up your power supply. So it's cheap and easy insurance. Better multimeter here. It'll go bing, there's a short, like that. And we're just going to go across these pins. It's going to be something like this. Thank you, Gamers Nexus. So if these guys are shorted to those ones, you're gonna have a bad time. That one's a sense pin, it's fine. It's the sort of thing where if your power connectors are shorted, your GPU's probably never gonna come back, she's done. When you're getting it off eBay, you might as well check. Yeah, so none of these are gonna blow up our power supply. Super easy, probably don't have to do it, but I would recommend doing it if you have a multimeter because cheap, easy insurance. Oh, shut up. Now what I wanna do is just take these apart, put them back together, see if there's anything obvious. And I find that a lot of the time, just disassembling and reassembling stuff that's dead is the easiest way to fix it. You won't know why you fixed it, but it just does. First one we're gonna look at is this RX 580, and we paid $150 for it. What do you think the chances are this was mined on, David? 100%. 100%, yeah, probably. One thing that I do like about this card is that there is still a sticker on the back. So chances are it hasn't been taken apart and no one's really taken a look into what's gone wrong with it. This one smells kinda weird. Like you know how there's those thrift shops that get cool stuff in? Oh yeah. And those are those ones that just like someone's nan died and her whole house is there. Oh no. This one smells like that. This might be completely unnecessary. It might just work. So easy to take it apart and just have a look. There we go. This card, it looks fine. Now there is just some crud on it. There's like a little bit of corrosion in some spots. That's kinda what I like to see because that's the sort of card where if you just give it a clean, it might just come back. Should we give it a little wash? Hell yeah. Just using a little bit of Bicep Propyl Alcohol and a toothbrush. Those spots that are kinda gnarly, just. Last little bit for this 580. Sorry David. If I was going to do this properly, I would also replace the thermal pads, but they seem like they're fine. And if it actually works later, maybe I'll replace them. This card's good to put in the system, but I just wanna keep running Jono's 28ETI to see if it eventually crashes. It is entirely possible that we fixed it when we just blew all of the crap out of it and put it in a case with good air flow. So it might've just been thermal throttling before. It's so hard to say. Our next card is this GeForce GTX 1080. Now I'm a little bit scared about this one because I had the exact same card in my system and these early ones from EVGA had a bit of a bad habit of kind of like exploding. There's just something wrong with the capacitors. Whatever, you updated the firmware, it was totally fine. Whoever owned this might've not and it might've just killed itself. Let's take it apart though, give it a little clean and then it should be good to put in the system. This one's also just like pretty broad-filled. Look, look, I think those are supposed to be holes but it's just like solid. I really miss the days of the capacitor plague. Used to be that something was dead. You could just take a look at it. One of these guys would be bulging, replace it. It's all good. Now it's so much more difficult. Even if a capacitor goes, it's like one of these stupid little things and they're super hard to deal with. That, yeah, that really looks like someone spilled a bunch of water on it. Well, sticking in some rice, I say. Yep, stick her in some rice. That's actually really satisfying in a weird way. Yeah, this is, I really have been loving this. I am a bit scared for this one though. On this part, you can really see just whatever was spilled on this. It's like all sticky up here collecting dust. It's even kind of wet, like right there still. Mm, tasty. Well, I think I found what's dead with this GPU and if we just take a look, yeah, that's. Now, how rough is this going to be to fix? This is a smaller Phillips and if we look right here, it looks like a really large Phillips when you put it against this chip. But yeah, I am very confident that this is what is wrong with this GPU. Now, can we get another one of these chips? I'm not sure, but there is one right here and we might have something that's dead around that has one of those, I don't know. Why might it? I found what's wrong with this. Do you want to have a little look? Someone like just extinguished a cigarette on top of that I see. Oh, there's also like a massive solder ball bridging a resistor. Yeah, that seems. Do you think that's the culprit or do you think someone tried to fix it? She's had some work done. The stickers were still on the GPU. So no one could have had, like I don't think anyone took it apart. What the heck's attacking? Oh, I was like. This is just disintegrating. It possibly caused like a short, then sent whatever this is. Looks like a MOSFET. I'm going to say it's a MOSFET. Yeah, it's probably, it's dead. It's dead. Yeah, it's very dead. Oh yeah. You might be able to get the icing markings of the not dead guy. Yeah, I did. Oh, and you bought it? I haven't bought it yet. Okay. If it failed short, then like replacing it doesn't matter, right? Cause it's already shorted. Duting is bad. Yeah, this is one bucket of short, right? Oh geez. Have you tried running it? I have not. I'm going to turn off this benchmark of Jono's cart. It's been running for three hours straight with a stress test and it hasn't failed yet. So I think it's safe to say it's fine or their problem was with Jono's system. That exploded MOSFET that we saw is shorted. So even if we replace it, it's effectively doing what it's going to do when it's on anyway. One of the tests that we wanted to do was what if we just shorted it and see if the card boots up? We don't have to take it off to test that cause it's already shorted. If you want it to work properly as an actual like load switch, we would replace it so that if it needs to turn off, it can. Yeah, the worst thing that could happen has already happened. I think that's a power supply trip, man. Yeah, that sounded like a power supply trip to me. That still smells fine. Send it again. Yeah. Oh. Oh. Maybe you just needed the magical hands, man. Do we have an output? No. Oh. It still is post coding. So like. Oh yeah, maybe it hasn't posted yet. I feel like we're in Windows right now. And so wait, if we're in Windows, then. Yeah. Then we can do stuff, yeah. No. Nothing. It's gone, it's gone. Knowing what PMOS fits do, I would assume that it would have to be closed for the graphics card to work. So it is closed permanently, not by choice. So yeah, I know I think there might be something else wrong. Okay, so what we're gonna do now is see if we get call voltage. This is a jank way to do it. There's no AC, it's all DC. It's all low voltage. One of the easiest ways to do it is probably the end of one of these capacitors. Nevermind. I'm getting negative 12 volts because I got it the wrong way around. But there you go, 12 volts. Okay, we have voltage. Well, that means the power supply is working. Wait, are you clicking through the GP right now? Like for display? Wait, what? Is the display working? We're getting call voltage. It's working. Wait. What? Yeah, it's working. Like we got call. GTX 1080, it's working. We got call voltage, man. It works, but I have no idea what we did to make it work. And you know what? We call that like... If it... So we removed the back plate. Although, wait, there might've been some stuff in there. There was some liquid. Yeah, have you tried to replace these? Yeah, because those touch the caps, right? Yeah, those touch the caps. Can you do a stress test? And do we have like a thermal camera to see if this actually gets warm? I can get a thermal camera. Oh. Oh. Maybe it's not so worky. She picks you up just to put you down again. It's less dead than before, at least. So we can potentially take off the back plate, look at it with like a thermal camera or something, and see if we can find out some stuff. That's an after lunch problem. I'm disappointed. I'm probably gonna do most of it off camera. We're gonna just move on, see if like... Where did that 580 go? See if this 580 after we cleaned it just works now. We have lights. We have fans. Oh. Interesting. I'm suspicious that it's gonna keep doing this. One thing that's interesting about this card is it has a BIOS switch on it. So... Oh, wow. Okay, so this is... I didn't want to say what I thought might've happened because it's so stupid, but I was a bit suspicious that there might've just been a mining BIOS on this with no video output, and you just switch it over to a normal gaming BIOS and it just boots up. Because we did switch from Nvidia to AMD, I'm just running DDU, getting Nvidia's drivers off there, and then this might work. That'd be crazy. 150 bucks for a 580. Can you believe it, David? Well, that's what it should cost. Yeah, that is what it should cost. We'll let it run through, but I think she's good. It would be so embarrassing to put up a video on fixing GPUs and not fix one. Well, did we actually just fix this thing with the flick of a switch? Maybe, hopefully it's not like that stupid 1080. Yeah, we'll leave it running for a little bit. Let's see what the next one is. Which one do you want to do? Let's do this one. What is that? Oh, this one's bad. So this one's... This is a 5700 XT. Beautiful card. Not great things have happened to this one, and someone's already had a crack at fixing it. We need to come over to the microscope to show you what's on the go here. You probably can't see it, but on this PCIe trace, there's a little capacitor that's missing right there. Also, it's all burned to heck up here. Now there's kind of two things that could have happened. This cap might've fallen off, card died, and whoever tried to repair it, because someone's clearly tried to repair this, was a big dumb dumb, and put their soldering iron right here and burned it. That's kind of best case scenario. Other option, this memory chip like destroyed itself, and in the process blew up this cap. If that happened, she's dead, never coming back. So in the microscope, you're able to see it. It looks like that this might've just completely blown itself off, although more likely, someone scratched this off trying to repair it. Got a big old ball of solder right there. That's definitely not helping anything. That also might've been this cap blew up, and in trying to repair it, they ended up just screwing up this one. You can also see some solder on this trace up here, where they presumably tried to, you know, add some solder to the trace and bridge it or whatever. Now, what you might think that you'd want to do is just attach like a wire there, wire there, and add a cap. But the problem is that PCIe traces are length matched, and very fiddly, basically. This capacitor being gone is a huge problem, because there are two traces on each one of these pins, and those need to be the same length within, I looked it up, and I think for gen three, it's like five thousandths of an inch or something stupid like that. That's just because the signal is switching so incredibly fast, that if one of them takes longer than the other, the whole thing just kind of falls apart. I'd like to say that I have a good fix for this, but I have a really dumb fix for this that might work. What was the success? This 580 seems to be working great. It's pretty much radon what we'd expect for a 3DMark score. This card has 16 PCIe lanes, and the very last one is the one that's blown up. No. If we just put it in the 8X slot, and don't use these ones, maybe it'll work. Let's try it. Well, this slot right here is 8X. As you can see, there's only pins up to there. Nothing at all. It doesn't even know that there's something in there. Like, we're just in windows. Fans haven't spun cards. Yeah, I think we're gonna just call this one a loss for now. I'll come back to it later and maybe have another look, but this one's bad vibes. 1080 Ti, 980 Ti. 980. I was afraid of that. There's nothing obviously wrong besides that it's clearly been stripped and presumably is dead. One of the many unfortunate things about this card is that it came with a PCIe power pin that just fell off in shipping. We need to reattach that before we can try and power it on. Given the burn marks on this, I don't think it's the first time it fell off. Pins back on. Now we just have to figure out which way these connectors are on because we put our power supply cables on the wrong way, the card explodes or our power supply shuts down. Either way, don't wanna do that. That's ground, yay. The end of this that has a little clip is the side that has ground. We just need to make sure that goes on the right way. Oh God, this is really sketchy. Do not do this ever, any of it. We did it. How thin are you that this level turned on? I feel like this one's hovering just above zero. Picked up the thermal camera. The reason that I want this is just to try and see if there's a short anywhere. It should just be hotter than everything else and then hopefully we can go from there. Oh wow, look at this though. It has all of the covers for the display outs. That's impressive. Wait, what? What the? No way. Why, how would this turn? Oh my God. GeForce GTX 980 Ti, what? Why is this on? What? I'm flabbergasted. Did you go buy a lot of tech? Yeah, holy. I just applied thermal paste. I can't believe this is just working. This is actually crazy. That 980 Ti, we got for $103. It ran. Score's a little bit low. Like it's 1700 points under the average, but there wasn't a cooler on it. So like pretty good. Yeah, let's see if HDMI just doesn't work. Is it working? Oh, it is. This card just works. Wow, this card's going for like 350, 400 bucks. We got it for 103. Hell yeah. Call that one a big win. I don't wanna take these connectors off. I'm gonna break the pin probably. Just gonna use a little bit of thermal adhesive and stick some mini heat sinks onto the memory chips that aren't going to be getting direct contact to the heat sink. The rest I think is gonna be totally fine with just airflow directly hitting them. I'm gonna put it right here and hope it still works. For cooling, I'm going to zip tie this fan to the card. Hell yeah. Yeah, now we just have to plug it in without breaking the pin off again. This pin is falling off. So I'm going to just use our PCIe to hold it in place. Can't believe this card is working. The only thing I can think of with this card is that it had the stock thermal compound on the GPU die and it was just completely dried out. So maybe it was just booting up almost immediately overheating and they were just like, oh, it's dead. Well, the score did increase a fair bit by turning the fan up. Now it isn't quite as fast as I want. It is getting up to about 83 degrees and we're probably losing clocks because of that. Although like, look at this thing. It's working. I can't believe it. This thing's sick, big W. Here's our final card and it's another one that clearly had work done on it. We have parts of it right here. Like look, even just on the PCIe, all scratched up. We're going to see what we can do though. Let's take it apart and we might have another water damage card. These thermal pads seem a little bit wet. It's not looking good, David. What's on the go here? Oh, this is bad. This is really bad. Just look at the corrosion on this card right around here. I feel like this card, one of two things is going to happen. Either we clean it up and whatever's shorted by shmoo up in here just kind of solves itself or it's completely dead. It's probably completely dead. Oh, this is terrible. This thing's not surviving this, David. So, oh, where do we even start with this? It's completely black and there's just, I don't even know what's all over it. Like it looks like the PCB here, yeah, is just completely lifted up. There's a pad here that's no longer really attached. Yeah, the PCB's kind of exploded all through here. Some of it just came off as I touched it. That's a good sign. It's also really hairy. I'm not a huge fan of that. Let's see what else we can find on here. Yeah, so this resistor is just crumbling. I don't know what to say other than, I don't know enough about electronics to really comment on this besides just complete destruction of everything that's kind of around this area. We'll give it a clean at least, see what it exposes. This poor card. What I find really interesting about this card is that it's water-cooled and it appears to have water damage, but I don't think that the water damage is related in any way to the water cooler. Everything around the die and around this all looks fine. It just kind of seems like someone spilled their drink on this corner. It's kind of hard to see through this camera here, but if I look in this, there's a literal hole in this PCB and I don't think it's a via or it might've been at one point, but it's much more than a via at this point. It's a almost resistor sized hole that just kind of goes through a couple layers. Like it looks like a cap exploded and corroded everything, but like there's no caps around here that exploded. It's just something very bad got on this and stayed on it for quite a while. Oh yeah, that just came right off. I think we just chuck this in the PC, see if it does anything. There's no coming back from this, I don't think. The only way to save this card that I can think of is just full zombie it. Like just pretty much everything from here, never use it again. Get like an external 12 volt power supply for this and hook it up like right to the VRMs or something. We might as well try the card, but this thing's so mangled, I don't even think it's worth the time to put that cooler back on. I'm just gonna hold this Intel stock heat sink up to the die. I have been wrong before, but nothing. Yeah, I don't think it's worth looking more into this card. It's mangled. This one's an L. We paid $400 for this, David. But I steamed decked them. Yeah, that's bad. Aside from what we just tried with these GPUs, there are a couple more methods to try and bring them back from the dead. Like for instance, our RX 580 here, where you're able to rescue from a bad BIOS by just getting lucky and there being a switch. But on most cards, you don't have dual BIOS. Try and fix those. You can use one of these guys right here, a BIOS flasher. And you can pick these up on AliExpress for under $5. With this, you can flash the BIOS on your card without even needing to power the GPU on. The best resource I found for this is a video from Deaf Dog that goes over the operation in excruciating detail. If all else fails, there's also the good old oven trick. Linus did make a video on this a couple of years ago, but maybe don't watch that. Like half the video is him just cleaning a toaster oven. Maybe just read this article, but I fix it. Basically, by heating your GPU to around 200 degrees Celsius, if a solder joint is cracked, it might expand just enough that the connection gets, well, connected again. I have heard people describe this as reflowing the solder, but realistically, the ovens are not getting hot enough. And if they did, it'll be a really bad time because all of the flux is gone. This is pretty much just a hail Mary though. And even if it does fix your GPU, it's probably gonna last a month or two. So should you buy a four parts GPU from eBay and try and fix it? No, I think you agree, David. Absolutely no. This was fun. Like I enjoyed looking at how just mangled this card is that I paid $400 for. I wouldn't recommend it. Sure, you still can get lucky like with our 580 or 980 Ti, but multiple of these already had serious attempts at repair done to them. If you're looking at less powerful cards, then maybe you can find one and it can be fun. It's not too expensive, but given the current price of GPUs, there's a lot of incentive for repair shops to try and fix these and sell them as working cards. On top of that, even if you have a full blown board repair level shop, like you might just not be able to get some of the stuff. If something breaks like a MOSFET, you can get it from Digi-Key and replace it, but memory or die and a lot of other special components, you just can't buy them and it sucks. If someone out there knows how to get GDDR6, let me know. So huge thanks to Origin PC for sponsoring this video. Their Millennium 5000T worked awesome as our test bench and it was really nice knowing that performance and thermals are not going to be a bottleneck in our testing. The fact you can swap out components without voiding the warranty is straight up awesome. And also like, just look at it. So much RGB, it looks cool. So thanks for watching this video, hit like, get subscribed. And if you want to watch something else, maybe watch our crazy trying TikTok tech hacks. They were bad.