It’s no secret that we’re a fan of eccentric repair stories here at Tom’s Hardware; we’ve already had classics like a dead RTX 5090 with a cracked PCB being revived, and an RX 7800 XT that was saved after a spoiled reflow attempt. Today’s tale is no different — in fact, if anything, this is perhaps the most we’ve seen one of our persistent GPU repair wizards struggle with a job. Spoiler alert, it works out at the end, but this RTX 4080 Super almost never posted, despite everything being thrown at it.
Converting 4080 into 4080 SUPER – YouTube
Tony from Northwest Repair got his hands on an RTX 4080 Super that he couldn’t repair — not for lack of trying though (as you’ll see), it was simply broken beyond saving. Our intrepid repairer, therefore, salvaged the working core and VRAM from the 4080 Super and brought in a donor PCB… which is actually a core and memory-less RTX 4080 non-Super. The discrepancy doesn’t matter for a master like Tony. “Board looks identical, so should work,” he says, and continues with the repair that will involve taking a 4080 Super core and mounting it on a standard 4080 board. A new VBIOS will be needed for the GPU to accept its identity, so the BIOS chip will need to be swapped as well.
The repair starts with flattening the donor PCB since it came from China, where it became severely warped in the process of stripping it off its core — something very common in the region. It was put on a custom heating plate with weights on top that should help straighten it some degree (no pun intended). After that, the soldering job begins. Tony casually solders the 4080 Super core onto the 4080 board in a beautiful montage, along with the memory modules and the BIOS chip, all while the PCB is sitting onto the heat plate, slowly leveling itself.
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One sponsored thermal camera segment later, the GPU fails to post despite showing positive signs of life when its data lines were checked prior. Tony ran a memory test, and it pinged two chips as the point of failure, but just to be sure he took off the core again to check whether it’s sitting flat first. Sure enough, one of the solder balls on the core was much larger than the others surrounding it. Our repair guru wasn’t interested in the why-s or how-s, so he just went ahead and reballed it. Unfortunately, it still didn’t work, though the culprit identified itself right away: two data lines weren’t connected to the core.