Burned ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 returns to life after fire damage repair
A Chinese repair technician known as Brother Zhang has shared a case involving an ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 that survived a house fire. According to the video, the owner used an electric heater during the Lunar New Year period, and the room later caught fire. Photos from the scene showed extensive damage, with most items in the room burned, including the owner’s desktop PC.
Apparently it’s not much of an issue for Brother Zhang. The card repair basically involved some cleaning and cooler replacement, since the board wasn’t actually damaged.
Source: Brother Zhang
The graphics card arrived heavily blackened, with visible scorching on the shroud and signs of oxidation across the board. Brother Zhang said the card had been working before the fire and had not previously been repaired. After opening the card, he checked for shorts and found no obvious electrical failure, which suggested the PCB and core power rails might still be intact.
Source: Brother Zhang
He then washed the card (yes, under tap water with a toothbrush), cleaned the PCIe and display interfaces, and dried it before repeating the measurements. With no short circuit detected, the card was powered on for a basic boot test. The board posted successfully, displayed video output, and was later fitted with a replacement cooler after the original housing had been damaged by the fire.
Because an exact GeForce RTX 4060 cooler was not available, Brother Zhang sourced a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti cooling assembly and modified it for the repair. Once reassembled, the card was identified in software as a GeForce RTX 4060 8GB running over a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface, which is normal for that model. He then moved on to thermal and stability checks.
Source: Brother Zhang
In testing, the repaired card reportedly reached around 56°C core temperature and 66°C hotspot under load, while board power was said to be around 115W. It is kind of ironic to run FurMark on a GPU that was already in a fire incident, though.
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