Too many flagship graphics cards are suffering unnecessary irreparable damage, reckons NorthWestRepair. The TechTuber, who specializes in graphics card repairs, has published a new short that bemoans a rash of Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 failures due to poor shipping and improper mounting practices. Remember, these flagship cards can cost $2,000 or more, but some choose to save nickels and dimes by skimping on packaging or support. That’s a false economy.
In the linked short, Tony from NorthWestRepair begins by showing a quartet of bare RTX 4090 PCBs all laid out next to each other. He explains that they all suffered the same fate: ripped pads on or around the GPU socket.
Tony concludes that the practically irreparable damage resulted from the card, or system housing the card, being damaged in transit. Another common cause of damage that looks like this is when weighty GPUs are installed without proper support. We guess sudden impacts, where improperly packed parcels are roughly handled, deliver the most catastrophic damage. Ripped pads like those shown could be the result of the shearing force between the PCB and cooler during an impact. However, Tony has seen this same kind of damage from cards installed without GPU supports when they were needed.
Proper packaging and GPU support are such minor expenses. Considering that an RTX 4090 costs around $2,000, this damage verges on a tragedy.
At the end of the short video, Tony shows off another RTX 4090 that has just arrived at his repair store. The box looks like it is the correct size, but apparently, it contained such scant packaging that the graphics card inside was “tumbling in the box.” Soon after he unpacked the card, apparent impact damage was seen on the twisted metal fan shroud. Tony hasn’t checked this GPU yet but was pretty confident it would also suffer from ripped pads on the PCB.
“Please package your GPUs properly using at least 2-inches of foam, or bubble wrap, all the way around it,” pleaded NorthWestRepair at the end of the video short. He went on to explain that when sending components for repair they should be “tightly packed inside the box so it does not tumble.”
An MSI sample repaired using a donor PCB
The above video short was released just ahead of a full feature video from NorthWestRepair, which told the tale of why 50% of all 4090 will end up in the trash. After his initial investigation of the MSI on the repair bench, Tony decided to lift the GPU core. He found “a ton of ripped pads,” meaning the GPU would be categorized as a ‘no fix.’ Fixing these is considered impractical, as it would take “a week or two” to do, with any fix also being prone to failure.
If you watch this second video, the second half of it documents Tony’s attempt to salvage the working components from the MSI and add them to a donor board that doesn’t have the solder pads problem. However, the donor board has its own issues, with evidence that little care was taken when stripping it.
This was quite an involved task for Tony’s skills, but as you will see, experience and patience paid off. The combination of the two non-working RTX 4090s resulted in a working model of one of the best graphics cards. Subsequent stress testing revealed that this one-good from two-bad graphics card salvage job was a resounding success.
