XFX RX 9070 XT cooler weighs around 1.1 kg, repair tech warns of PCB stress
Brazilian repair technician repairs XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT after suspected cooler weight damage.
A Brazilian repair technician TriTech Informática has published a repair video for an XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT. The card had already been partially repaired before recording, with the 1.8V power rail restored, but it still failed to output an image.
The technician then inspected the graphics chip solder. According to the video, the solder around the GPU corners looked unusual, and the technician suspected stress from the card’s large cooler. The card was shown with a much larger cooler than the PCB itself, which is common on many high-end graphics cards.
Source: TriTech Informática
Just use a GPU support bracket
The technician weighed the cooler at around 1.0 to 1.1 kg. With the full card assembled, the weight was shown at about 1.3 kg. The PCB alone was estimated at around 200 grams, which means most of the total weight comes from the heatsink assembly.
Heavy GPU coolers without proper support, or without adequate reinforcement under the cooler, may be one reason why memory or GPU solder joints can separate from the PCB. If that happens, the BGA pads can lose contact with the GPU, causing the card to become unstable or stop working. The typical repair is to remove the GPU, repair any damaged pads, reball the chip and solder it back onto the PCB.
Source: TriTech Informática
But the interesting part is that because the Radeon RX 9070 XT is still a new card, the technician said there was no compatible reballing stencil available for this GPU . As a result, each solder ball had to be placed manually. The card was later shown booting correctly and reporting normal parameters in GPU-Z, although the test system was limited to PCIe x8.
Source: TriTech Informática
So unless you want your card to appear in a repair video, just buy a cheaper VGA support, or use whatever you have around to suppor the card in the PC.
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