Generally speaking, if you want to learn to weld, you should buy a cheap circuit board that costs a few hundred yuan, or try to find old parts that you don’t need at home. However, recently, the foreign repair channel NorthridgeFix shared a strange repair commission. Someone actually got one that costs US$5,000 (approximately NT$160,000) and is limited to only 1,300 pieces worldwide. MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z graphics cardCome to practice welding, but it breaks and needs to be sent for repair. Can it only be said to be fun for rich people?
Image source: NorthridgeFix
A novice took the $5,000 RTX 5090 Lightning Z to practice welding, and it was damaged immediately after only 1,300 copies were produced worldwide.
The well-known American hardware repair YouTube channel “NorthridgeFix” recently shared that they received a repair request for MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z. The owner of the card also attached a note to the effect that he wanted to learn to solder tiny 0402 resistors, so he used the graphics card at hand to practice. As a result, he accidentally tore off one of the soldering pads, and then the graphics card could not be turned on at all.
MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z is currently NVIDIA’s top-end RTX 5090 extreme overclocking special edition. Only 1,300 units are produced worldwide and the market price is as high as $5,000. This card itself is designed for use by professional overclockers, not a product that ordinary consumers will buy.
NorthridgeFix said it put the card under a microscope and found that the damage was much more severe than described on the note. There are many 100kΩ and 15kΩ resistors missing from the circuit board. Some may have been knocked off during the soldering process, and some had gaskets torn off along with the resistors:
Image source: NorthridgeFix
Not only that, the power traces on the circuit board also showed obvious damage. This is no longer a simple problem of being crooked or loose, but structural damage, which is very difficult to repair. NorthridgeFix also mentioned that this is one of the rarest cases of graphics card damage they have ever received.
Since the traces were broken and there was no way to solder them back directly, NorthridgeFix chose to use thin wires to manually jump the wires to re-establish the circuit connections:
Image source: NorthridgeFixㄋ
The next step is to replace the missing resistors. Some of the resistors were sent by the card owners themselves, while others were taken by NorthridgeFix from other scrapped cards and used. These 0402 specification resistors are very small, only about 1mm × 0.5mm, and are almost invisible to the naked eye. To accurately weld them to the correct position, the technical requirements are very high:
Image source: NorthridgeFix
After all the welding repairs were completed, NorthridgeFix performed a voltage test on the card, and preliminary results showed that the values were back to normal. However, the complete boot-up and stability tests have not been completed before the filming of the video is completed. NorthridgeFix said that it will further confirm in the future. Judging from the current situation, the probability of this card being successfully rescued is quite high:
Image source: NorthridgeFix
According to the analysis of foreign media Tom’s Hardware and Club386, this graphics card owner may not just be practicing, but trying “resistor modification”.
Full video:
Source: KOCPC Chinese