Baking does work.
Obviously it's a last resort, really bad solution, and i wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they knew 100% what they were doing, but it does sometimes work.
NO, NO IT DOES NOT. This only proves what I wrote earlier. Everyone that watches that stupid Linus video and actually does it, creates more headaches for professionals who get the leftovers for parts. Actual successful repair using this rookie and stupid technique and without damage to other things is less frequent than Halley's Comet.
Background:
On some rare occasions during the card lifetime, it gets excessively hot and bows, which
in even more rare occasions, causes large
BGA elements (such as RAM or GPU ICs) to partially detach due to uneven expansion/shrinking.
When that happens, it might:
- Rip off the pads (connection points) from the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) or from the Chip (which is essentially a smaller PCB with a die soldered or epoxied to it). Solder balls are not melted.
- Rip off other elements due to uneven heating (or crack due to physical tension).
- Crack-tear PCB tracks on top or in between the layers (as the cards bows, as it cools down, they might touch each other again).
Only "1" off this list
sometimes can be repaired by reflowing, but reflowing is
EVEN heating (again, to prevent BOWING) of the whole card using an
infrared heating system with feedback and temperature control, maintaining
element heating profile up to a melting point of
tin (most cards are assembled using lead-free materials per RoHS). Infrared light (due to its wave-length) applies heat evenly - front and back, top and bottom, components and PCB all at the same time, and not only to the outer surface and regardless of surface material - the tin balls are located
underneath the chips and not on top. That way the solder points and pads are reaching the soldering temperatures evenly. In the case of the oven, the surfaces are exceeding their temperature profiles and get ruined while the connection points are not even close to melting.
Besides, not every professional can reflow every chip properly, it is a very delicate task. Check out the
process. Some
cheaper home-made tools are still complicated but not impossible.
On top of that,
VAST MAJORITY of card failures I have seen are (in the popularity order)
- VRM circuitry (shot MOSFETs, capacitors, controllers, etc mainly due to overclocking and poor heat dissipation, people only care about GPU chip temps, but also voltage spikes, static, etc)
- bad (failed) tantalum capacitors that are also used in VRM and decoupling circuitry
- GPU chip failure (voltage spikes, static electricity, overheating, impact damage)
- memory ICs (overclocking, poor quality, voltage spikes, poor cooling)
- knocked off-the-board elements (poor handling, impact)
- crystal oscillator failure (poor quality)
- failures due to poor board design (internal short circuits between the layers)
None of these has anything to do with the cause that can be fixed by reflow.
Baking on the contrary causes the PCB to bow and tears the tracks between the layers, rips off components and pads, and cooks the components due to excessive temperature or heating speed or uneven heating. Suggesting "baking" is
poor advice by the least means. This leads to one of those cases, where repair after "repair" is 100 times more complicated and expensive.