RTX 4070 SUPER survives hammer damage, but only the GPU and memory were reused
The cooler and PCB had to be discarded.
An ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER was reportedly damaged with a hammer during an argument between a couple, leaving the card in a state where a normal repair was no longer practical.
The card’s metal backplate was badly bent, the display outputs were misaligned, and the PCB had cracks, tears, and delamination. ASUS reportedly refused free warranty service because the damage was intentional.
The interesting part is not that the full graphics card was recovered. It was not. The cooler and PCB were effectively written off, and the original TUF card could not be restored in any reasonable way.
Source: Brother Zhang
Brother Zhang first confirmed that the system was powered off when the card was hit. This reduced the chance of damage to the GPU die and GDDR6X memory. A later inspection showed a short on the 1.8V rail, but this was judged to be caused by PCB damage rather than a dead GPU or memory package.
Source: Brother Zhang
The repair then moved to a board swap. The GPU and memory were removed from the broken ASUS PCB and installed on another board. While this is not a simple repair, it was still faster than trying to rebuild a cracked and delaminated PCB.
The card eventually powered on and passed stress testing after being fitted with a Lenovo OEM cooler. The result is less an ASUS TUF RTX 4070 SUPER recovery and more a successful GPU and memory transplant from a card that looked beyond repair.
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