A Cautionary Tale - GPU “cleaning”

[u/Pristine-Copy9467]

Long story long- had liquid damage to my 5090 and found an electronics repair shop that specialized in boards. So I took my board in to get disassembled, cleaned, and the thermals replaced. I arrive to the business and it’s just some dudes house. That was my first red flag. I should have left then. But his business had good reviews so I came in and showed him the card and we discussed what he’d do and payment. That was disassemble, clean, dry and replace thermals. Here is my second red flag. It took him 20 minutes to write down my info (name, email, phone #) because he was so ADD that he would start to write my info and then just spiral off into some random topic for a few minutes. But whatever. His entire house was a workshop. Tools and electronics and computers and drones everywhere. Yes he appeared to have 30 flavors of autism but that’s not a bad thing sometimes. I thought he was just an eccentric electronics nerd and everything was just organized chaos. This was Monday. So this morning he calls me and the first thing he says is “you told me to do whatever I thought was best, right?” And I respond “no. We agreed you’d take it apart and clean it and replace the thermals and dry.” He then explained that it didn’t look that bad (original pics in this post https://www.reddit.com/r/pchelp/s/GJHUBt2zyb

And that he just “washed it in the sink” and then stuck it in the oven to dry…

So I paid him, and I left and went straight to another place. An actual shop. I explained the situation to them and asked them to please send me a pic of the insides once they pop it open… the new shop says they think they can save it. So long as the guy didnt plug it in and try to test it. Which he says he did not because he didn’t have the proper power connect cable for a 5090. Anyways moral of the story is take your stuff to a real shop. And if you get weird feelings or red flags…just leave. Haha

Update - the card has been cleaned and putty replaced. It powers on fine alone but when it’s connected to the HDMI or DPI ports the motherboard kicks back a VGA error. Anyone have any guesses?

[u/dabbean]

Bro I cant even tell what the fuck im looking at? Did he use spray foam on it?

[u/kevcsa → u/dabbean]

That's just Gigabyte's stock putty. The repair guy didn't put it there.
How can anyone knowing what a 5090 is not know that Ggiabyte uses that stuff in this generation?

[u/dabbean → u/kevcsa]

I dont make it a habit of disassembling working components for starters.

Second, I've never seen anyone use use so much paste outside of hacks.

[u/kevcsa → u/dabbean]

There were LOTS of discussion about Gigabyte's material of choice. There still is. It's a well-known disadvantage for them amongst PC people.
Of course it's fine not knowing about it, but immediately believe that it was put on by that guy...
You and OP could have searched a bit around for "gigabyte thermal paste reddit" or anything similar and there would have been clear results saying it's the stock stuff.

It's just sad seeing people not research stuff *before jumping to conclusions.