Help with Nvidia GTX 1080 Repair

[MrCravon]

Hi,

I have an Nvidia GTX 1080 Card that died on me a couple of months ago. At the time I didn't have time to look in to it and I bought a replacement immediately. However, now I am thinking the 1080 can be a nice upgrade for my daughter's gaming PC if I can get it working again. I have done some repair work before but usually when I work on boards I have the full schematic available. And I haven't found any very useful schematics online with some google searches at least.

When I power up my computer with the card installed the PSU immediately goes in to fail safe mode suggesting there is some short-circuit in the card. If I power up the computer with the card installed but only powered through the PCI slot. There is no failsafe triggered on the PSU. But there is also no screen output. (Maybe that is normal behavior when the card is only powered through PCI) After taking off the cooler and doing a visual inspection of the board I can not find anything obvious. There is no bulging capacitors, no visible charring or visible heat damage and I can't see any solder joints with cracks or significant corrosion.

Anyone who has some suggestions on what steps I should take next in order to find the faulty components?

I had the following next steps in mind:

1. Measure resistance of RAM power rail to GND. I would need some help identifying the correct points to measure without a schematic at hand.
2. Try to power the card with my lab PSU with a current limiter set to 1A and look for hotspots on the card. I don't have a good way to measure for hotspots so it would be me touching components with my finger. Not the most accurate way of troubleshooting.
3. Just start de-soldering components and measure the values.


I am open to suggestions on how to approach this. And if anyone know of what might "typically" be wrong that causes a short circuit on the power input side of the card any help and pointers would be much appreciated.

At some point I had some power cables directly soldered to the solder joints on the back of the card to make the card fit in a low profile case. However, they have been removed and the card was working for quite some time after those had been removed.

I enclosed some pictures of the card in question if someone want to point to specific components.


Thank you for taking the time to read this!