Experts found a fly under the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition video chip, due to which the video card did not work

Experts found a fly under the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition video chip, due to which the video card did not work

TechTuber NorthWestRepair experts discovered a bug (insect) between the graphics processor and the contact pads of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition printed circuit board during repair work. Due to this unusual element inside, the video card did not work.

The customer who contracted NorthWestRepair to repair the graphics card explained that he had a “brand new” Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition that he bought on sale without any warranty. It must have been a bargain. No wonder the cheap video card didn’t work. However, the device showed some signs of life. When the system was turned on, the fans of the graphics adapter were spinning up to maximum speed, but the image was not displayed on any monitor.

NorthWestRepair experts began investigating the incident from the very basics. They carefully disassembled the card, completely exposing the printed circuit board for detailed inspection. The repair technician performed all the usual steps at this stage of studying non-working electronics, including testing the adapter for short circuits to the power supply, fixing the required voltage level on the main consumers, inspecting the circuit board for faults and cracks under a microscope, and ringing out the circuits and connections, including checking the crystal oscillator and connections to the BIOS chips.

After all the checks, the engineer suggested that the most likely candidate for the fault was the GPU. NorthWestRepair decided to remove the AD102 chip for inspection and study. Using a BGA desoldering tool, the expert disconnected the GPU and discovered a dead insect underneath. Its presence must have affected some BGA pins and caused the no image error.

After cleaning the chip contacts and reinstalling the chip on the video card, testing the video adapter showed that the once dead RTX 4090 is now full of life. The adapter earned, started and showed good results in 3DMark. NorthWestRepair explained that the card is actually new after the bug has been removed, is ready to be handed over to the customer, and can now be played without the previously identified errors.

A profile expert explained that it is highly unusual for something like a flying bug to enter a clean electronics assembly room, especially an Nvidia FE-level graphics card. So the fact of an insect getting under the video card chip is considered a rare turn of events in the field of microelectronics. And removing the insect and returning the adapter to work showed that the problem was precisely in the physical base.

In September 2022, Nvidia revealed the appearance of its RTX 4090 Founders Edition reference PCB. Video cards of the 40 series are based on the Ada Lovelace architecture (TSMC 4 nm process) and use RT-cores of the third generation and tensor cores of the fourth generation. The RTX 4090 has an AD102 video chip installed. This graphics processor has 76300000000 transistors and up to 18432 CUDA cores in the full configuration, in the RTX 4090 there are 16384 such cores.

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