Ooooh I had to do this several times back in the day with my laptop's 8800 GTX. It was a known issue with the series although I cant remember which component had the solder that would get cracks in the traces I believe ?
It was replaced once near the end of the warranty period and after that, I was left to fix it myself by reflowing the solder by heating the card in the oven and letting it cool slowly. It took about 2 hours of gradual heating and cooling and was very doable if you followed a guide or just used some brain cells to think about heating and cooling cycles.
It was the solder balls themselves that cracked due to thermal expansion/contraction stress: it turned out that the solder material wasn't up to the job.
I had one of those in a corporate laptop and got the motherboard replaced by a technican that come to my home to get the work done.
For me the main effect of watching him work was that I lost my inhibitions to opening up laptops and do things there myself. Up to that point I had decades of building my own PC with proper slots and sockets, but laptops seemed obviously designed not to be servicable at all, or at least not by mere mortals.
But once I saw how vendors clipped keyboards in place and where screws might be hidden, they became fair play and I started upgrading all ultra cheap laptops I had bought for my triplets to maximum specs over the next years. In those glorious days they still featured socketed CPUs and DIMMs, as well as SATA drives, so going from single to quad cores, plenty extra clocks and cache size, 0,5 to 3GB and from HDD to SSDs was easy enough to do, and ensured they could transition from Windows 95 right up to Windows 7 at the end. The mechnics of these Acers were just top notch, with the earphone sockets being the only failure point, easily overcome with USB headsets. And the originally ultra-expensive top quad-core CPUs, had dropped to a pittance on eBay after a few years, while DRAM became very cheap even new.
They never became gaming machines, but that was quite intentional at the time.
And any laptop since, became fair game. I also started going for entry level models, that I would immediately upgrade, because that was usually way cheaper than getting them at desired spec from the vendor.
Got plenty of small capacity DIMMs and SSDs stowed in a drawer and practically new that way.
I even progressed to mobile phones, because kids just don't value and treat those things like the dad who had to work to pay for them, so again, after some dives into iFixit, I got started and while I don't really enjoy that work, I sure appreciate the savings.
But I haven't yet disassembled GPUs: you'd need whole sets of different thickness pads, pastes and whatnot on hand, to just put them back together after having a closer look. But also so far, none have yet exhibited those signs of worn out pads or run-away paste, even if I tend to prefery entry level PNY cards, which are famous for such issues, for their narrower design, since my workstations tend to be crammed with other cards and cables.
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