Over the years, we’ve covered stories about scammers selling gamers anything else other than the GPU they ordered, along with a handful of GPUs arrived faulty or DOA. Well, today’s story is surprisingly wholesome and somewhat biblical: the resurrection of a dead NVIDIA RTX 3070.
Here’s the story: Almost a fortnight ago, a Redditor by the handle External_Length_8877 posted on the SerbianGaming subreddit about how his father brought his dead RTX 3070 back to life by third-partying some components. For the record, they said that they initially brought the card to a repair shop, but the place demanded US$120 (~RM487) to fix it, but they declined.
Stara škola električara – najbolja
byu/External_Length_8877 inSerbiaGaming
The OP then found their unlikely saviour in the form of his own father: he discovered the issue behind the dead RTX 3070 and repaired it using a capacitor from an old radio, as you can see in the embedded post here. Talking to Tom’s Hardware, the OP said their father discovered a capacitor on the card had been knocked out of place, having fallen between the card and the radiator.
If it wasn’t already obvious, fallen capacitors can’t just be put back. You need to replace them with a new one, and in this case, one that is a 16V, 270μF hard polymer capacitor, no longer than 3mm. To compound the issue further, the poster lives in Serbia, which isn’t a country where these special capacitors lie around freely. The OP’s father, though, who goes by the name Alexander, had something more than that with him: 35 years as a brigadier, tasked with maintaining the power lines in Serbia. That, and a helluva lot of technical know-how of repairing electronics, including less industrial, delicate graphics cards too.
To solve the problem, Alexander salvaged a different, cheaper, and larger capacitor from an old radio and soldered it to the card. As you can see in the image, it sticks out of the card like a sore thumb, but hell, it surged power through the card once more. As an extra added bonus, the OP’s father even replaced the thermal paste on the RTX 3070 with a “special” one designed for high-voltage lines.
At the end of the day, the RTX 3070 was in working order, with the GPU’s peak temperature never exceeding 80°C, although some redditors point out that the capacitor being used may not be suited for long-term use because of its higher resistance, which in turn could also be a contributing factor to the card’s higher temperature. Still, 80°C isn’t terrible, and as a refresher, ambient temperatures also play a role. Again, it’s a small issue, with the greater story here being a GPU being given the Messiah treatment.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware, Reddit)
