You trust the repair shop though and because you areВ none the wiser you go along with it.

Make no mistake these solder balls are tough little beasties and very very rarely fail. This is highly unlikely unless there has been physical damage, such as dropping your laptop from a great height. They could also claim the solder balls have cracked, a.k.a dry solder joint. In fact what would have happened is it would have gone into thermal protection mode way before then. These solder balls melt at around 220В° C вЂ“В if your GPU had actually gotten to that temperature it would have melted like the reactor at Chernobyl. Wait, what? What they just told you is not that the chip is dead and needs replaced, no no no, what they told you is that the lead-free solder balls which connect a BGA (such as a GPU) to the board are probably at fault here. You take it to your local repair shop and they tell you вЂsure, no problem, itвЂ™ll just be the solder balls, weвЂ™ll reball it for you no problem!вЂ™. If this chip is in your beloved laptop you probably donвЂ™t want to buy a new laptop instead you want it repaired. At high temperatures the tracks (or вЂbumpsвЂ™) in a flip-chipВ design BGA chipВ physically deform and you end up with a dead chip. Over timeВ this constant change in temperature causes its internal circuitry to start decaying. It heats up because itвЂ™s drawing high current and the energy dissipates as heat. When a high performance chip, such as a GPU, is working hard it heats up. Lets not beat about the bush though вЂ“ itвЂ™s bollocks and donвЂ™t pay for it.

Maybe itвЂ™s the easy money or maybe they just like the temporary smile on the customerвЂ™s face. What they arenвЂ™t telling you, or donвЂ™t realise themselves, is neither did it need reballed nor is it now repaired. They make the claim that a dead GPU can be repairedВ by reballing it. Reballing GPUs seems to be what all the cool kids are into these days.

Graphic card reflow