Fixing broken ram by baking

TheOuterOne

New member
Sticking your GPU in the oven has been a well-known fix for certain problems, but would it work with RAM? Let's find out!

Here's our victim; 2x2GB DDR2 corrupted Kingston RAM.

CkWArAC.jpg


My Core 2 Duo test bench:

xA5gF3g.jpg


Memtest (I tested single channel as well)
Errors; It's over NINETHOUSAAAAAND :D

tkpvd2a.jpg


First, I let the oven heat up with alu foil in there already, 200 degrees Celcius. When it was ready, I laid the ram sticks on the alu foil and set a timer for 11 minutes. After that, I opened the door to let the ram cool down gradually.

uZGK6SQ.jpg


Memtest results first dimm:

0dbir6s.jpg


Hm, that didn't do much. Let's check the other dimm..

2kJONM5.jpg


It worked! Although it's just one of the two, I'm very happy to see this. I find it weird it worked since you'd say it were the chips that were broken. Well, apparently not :cool:

I hope to see others test this method as well to see how it works out.
FYI, pics are made with the Canon 7D.
 
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Interesting read.
I tried baking my old HD4850 a while ago and had no success, sadly.
I'm curious how long will it last though and can you just do it over again untill the end of time and never buy ram ever again :lol:?
 
Interesting read.
I tried baking my old HD4850 a while ago and had no success, sadly.
I'm curious how long will it last though and can you just do it over again untill the end of time and never buy ram ever again :lol:?

It depends what's actually broken from it.

If components overheat to an extent that they warm up the solder points, and then the memory chip/GPU or whatever becomes slightly misalligned, it works fine as long as the system is hot, but as soon as it cools down again it's then lost contact with the connection points. Of course now it no longer works, it can never heat up on its own again enough to reallign by itself.

There was the old 'towel trick' with 360s when they had red rings of death. The red rings were caused because the CPU/GPU became misalligned. Then if you turns it on it could never get hot enough by itself as you could never get into a game, but if you wrapped it in towels, it stopped the heat getting out and so even without being in a game, it heated up to the extent of melting the solder points and working again.

This method was a bit hit and miss since it often couldn't heat up enough to melt the solder points on its own.

The oven method worked wonders for me. The only time it didn't work was because I tested it too soon after bringing it out of the oven, causing the fan regulator to blow.

The rest of it still worked though, just meant it had to be run like this:

rONBIXV.jpg


It was all good fun though! :)
 
Interesting read.
I tried baking my old HD4850 a while ago and had no success, sadly.
I'm curious how long will it last though and can you just do it over again untill the end of time and never buy ram ever again :lol:?

As long as you want to use DDR2 ram, hehe.

It depends what's actually broken from it.

If components overheat to an extent that they warm up the solder points, and then the memory chip/GPU or whatever becomes slightly misalligned, it works fine as long as the system is hot, but as soon as it cools down again it's then lost contact with the connection points. Of course now it no longer works, it can never heat up on its own again enough to reallign by itself.

There was the old 'towel trick' with 360s when they had red rings of death. The red rings were caused because the CPU/GPU became misalligned. Then if you turns it on it could never get hot enough by itself as you could never get into a game, but if you wrapped it in towels, it stopped the heat getting out and so even without being in a game, it heated up to the extent of melting the solder points and working again.

This method was a bit hit and miss since it often couldn't heat up enough to melt the solder points on its own.

The oven method worked wonders for me. The only time it didn't work was because I tested it too soon after bringing it out of the oven, causing the fan regulator to blow.

The rest of it still worked though, just meant it had to be run like this:

rONBIXV.jpg


It was all good fun though! :)
It probably works for my 2 broken motherboards as well. One of them is Pentium 4, te other is an AMD Athlon. I'll try that soon :)

EDIT:
Does anyone here have corrupt RAM? If so, would you try fixing it using this method? There's not much to loose except for keyrings..

EDIT 2:
I wonder if you'd fix an Xbox 360 in an oven... ;) 11 minutes is very specific too lol

Yeah, anything around 10 minutes would do I guess, I put 'em in there for 11 for no specific reason :P

EDIT 3:
I had a reason for the 11 minutes, actually. I had a look at how long graphics cards had to be in the oven, considering the soldering probably had the same melting temperature.
 
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It depends what's actually broken from it.

If components overheat to an extent that they warm up the solder points, and then the memory chip/GPU or whatever becomes slightly misalligned, it works fine as long as the system is hot, but as soon as it cools down again it's then lost contact with the connection points. Of course now it no longer works, it can never heat up on its own again enough to reallign by itself.

There was the old 'towel trick' with 360s when they had red rings of death. The red rings were caused because the CPU/GPU became misalligned. Then if you turns it on it could never get hot enough by itself as you could never get into a game, but if you wrapped it in towels, it stopped the heat getting out and so even without being in a game, it heated up to the extent of melting the solder points and working again.

This method was a bit hit and miss since it often couldn't heat up enough to melt the solder points on its own.

The oven method worked wonders for me. The only time it didn't work was because I tested it too soon after bringing it out of the oven, causing the fan regulator to blow.

The rest of it still worked though, just meant it had to be run like this:



It was all good fun though! :)
Good to know!

Do you bake it exactly at 200 degrees or +/-10 will work as well?:)
 
I tried fixing a pentium 4 motherboard but the old style caps swollowed. I also forgot to take out the battery. It exploded
 
I tried fixing a pentium 4 motherboard but the old style caps swollowed. I also forgot to take out the battery. It exploded

Haha sounds fun xD Blowing up caps is great when you reverse bias them, especially the older ones without the pressure vent grooves in the top :D
 
Oh god the towel trick with the 360s :D

I kept my RRoD 360 alive for 3 months using the towel trick before even that didn't fix it anymore.
 
Weird how that worked on your DDR2 RAM... but for successful solder reflow you need to hit the sweet spot between 250c - 310c then let the item cool in the oven, removing it into room temps can cause cooling fractures in the reheated solder.
 
Weird how that worked on your DDR2 RAM... but for successful solder reflow you need to hit the sweet spot between 250c - 310c then let the item cool in the oven, removing it into room temps can cause cooling fractures in the reheated solder.

I did, I'll edit the post a bit, forgot to add that.

EDIT: Wait, no. I said that I let it cool down gradually with the door open :P

I'll try the other dimm and a dead mobo soon, with your sweet spot. If it works I'm happy to see the other dimm working again lol :)
 
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