Chinese hardware technician, Brother Zhang, recently posted a repair video of an NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti that literally got bent in half, reportedly in a car crash. A word of warning to DIY aficionados: the images and video are not for the faint of heart.
Getting Bent, Literally
The RTX 5060 Ti in question is from the Chinese brand AX Gaming. According to Brother Zhang, the card was being stored in the boot of the car, when the vehicle got rear ended. The end result of that crash was a card with a severely distorted cooler, backplate, and bracket. By the by, the owner was unharmed in the collision.
But the most miraculous story here is that the card actually survived and wasn’t a total goner; in spite of the mangled metal, the PCB was pretty much spared because it was short and half the length of the cooler itself.
We Need A Memory Chip Infusion. Stat!
Note that we said “pretty much spared”. While the PCB remained largely intact, there was still some damage to the RTX 5060 Ti. In his video, Brother Zhang indicated that there was still a slight bend, but upon booting it for the first time since the accident, it was clear that something had been shaken loose.
Windows could detect the card, but installing drivers would result in a black screen. Brother Zhang’s memory tests found no errors, but after resoldering the memory chip closest to the bent area, the card booted up in working order, with Windows recognising the GPU, along with its Samsung memory chips and a PCIe 5.0 8x interface.
Suffice to say, the original cooler was, as the parlance goes, rekt’d, and Brother Zhang’s attempt at reusing it on the PCB is, quite honestly, painful to look at. It’s blindingly clear that if the owner wishes to keep on using their revived RTX 5060 Ti, they are going to need to search for an alternative cooler for it.
(Source: Brother Zhang via YouTube, Videocardz)
