Here’s a bent-out-of-shape GPU repair that quickly turned from a curiosity into a horror story: A dead Aorus-branded Nvidia RTX 4090 card landed on the desk of Northwest Repair, originally reported to have a melted connector and “some knocked off components,” but one by one, slowly, the tech finds so much wrong with this card that it’s deemed irreparable by the end. That’s rare for a GPU in those skillful hands. Let’s dive into the rocky journey of attempting to fix a Scoliosis-ridden graphics card that’s literally bent out of shape.
What happened with this 4090 ? – YouTube 
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Once disassembled, the PCB itself was basically straight, but the cooler was so twisted that our host, Tony, just gave up trying to bend it back into shape. The heatpipes were fine, but the fin stack was separating from the vapor chamber, and the thermal pads weren’t even making contact with the VRAM and most of the MOSFETs.
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“Screw this,” exclaimed the seasoned GPU tech, as he moved on to testing the GPU itself, pulling out the multimeter. There was a dead short on the 12V rail, 1.8V rail, and the memory, but the 5V and PEX were seemingly okay. After injecting current into the 12V rail, he formed the initial hypothesis. Under a thermal camera, he saw heat building up around the VRAM area, indicating that 12V was shorted to the memory and likely propagated further, frying other components. Checking the core’s resistance, however, confirmed that it wasn’t shorted, so there was hope.