There are days when this writer comes across hardware news that just breaks your heart, including news of components being victims of gunshots or even the many people that were scammed with fake GPUs. The most recent news from Chinese hardware technician, Brother Zhang, who receied an NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super that was the victim of a lover’s quarrel.
What Happened?
How the spat started isn’t important here, but what transpired during the quarrel is. Supposedly, the PC gamer’s girlfriend literally brought the hammer down on the card, mangling it to the point that it wouldn’t boot. The good news here is that, despite all that violence, Brother Zhang was still able to save the RTX 4070 Super.
It goes without saying that the card wasn’t going to be restored to its original shape or self. As shown in his video, the ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4070 Super lost its cooler and the PCB. Oh, and there was also a short on the 1.8V rail, but Brother Zhang determined this to be cuase by PCB damage rather than GPU or memory package damage.
Transplanting To Save The GPU
The more important components, namely the GPU core and the surrounding memory chips, were miraculously spared from the carnage. The solution, then, was clear: transplant the surviving GPU die and GDDR6X memory onto a new PCB. Note that we said that it was a clear solution, but it was anything but simple: to be able to do something like what Brother Zhang is doing, you’d really need to know your way around circuit boards and the soldering iron. Having said that, this approach was still much faster than trying to rebuild the card’s damaged PCB.
In any case, the transplant work, and the newly transplanted RTX 4070 Super passed stress testing and was fitted with a cooling solution taken from a Lenovo OEM card. Ultimately, we could tell you that old idiom regarding hell and a woman scorned, but a better, and perhaps more modern, lesson to be learned here is: if you’re going to have a row with your significant other, make sure all your tools and toolkit are out of reach and out of site.
(Source: Brother Zhang via YouTube, Videocardz)