this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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Very Real Tech Pics

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

After working in IT since 1999, I can count on my dads lefthand fingers the times I've had to solder a graphics card.

PS: My dad lost his left arm in 1996

[–] BigDanishGuy 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've done it twice actually... But I come from an embedded engineering background.

Replaced some dead caps on an expensive GPU once and the other time it was a laptop where some of the GPU memory had broken(? IDK really how it happened, it was my boss's personal machine, so few questions were asked) the connections.

In the latter case we desoldered all the tantalum caps and put the motherboard in our reflow oven. Then resoldered the tantalums. The fear being that tantalums wouldn't survive the oven we used for prototypes in the RD department I was in at the time (I count this as IT, as the admin was also an RD developer).

Both times it worked.

With that said, I don't think that I've even seen a soldering station in an IT department since the mid 00s.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but did you solder it midair like this boss?

[–] BigDanishGuy 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nope, threw it in the air and soldered it without ANY support before it hit the table - old western gunman style!

Smh, there's a whole genre in electronics humor about stock photos. At least this model didn't hold on to the hot end of the iron.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

My only question is if they are aiming to make their photos accurate and just have no idea or if they are deliberately going for believable to non-tech people but ridiculous to anyone who knows something about what's going on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

They might just be aiming to get free advertisement on sites like Lemmy.

[–] BigDanishGuy 2 points 8 months ago

In favor of doing it deliberately wrong is that trying to do it right, and failing, would be more embarrassing.

Yes, you are a jackass, but you're clearly trying to be one, so good job!

I mean, nobody has said anything about ESD or ventilation. There's no fume hood or equivalent nor any ESD protection. If the model had actually attempted to solder correctly, then people in the know would have attacked the picture for more substantial reasons, than the apparent ridiculousness.

And what do you want to be associated with your products? People who are clearly just modeling, or people who are giving false impressions about the product? The latter is a legal liability TBH, so better to go the first route.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

He's not using the soldering iron per se, he's threatening to use it. "Nice memory chip you got there, shame if something happened to it."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

You don't need it, because thanks to the two power supplies you can run your CPU at double speed!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Not the technician we need, but the technician we deserve.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

When the interrogator gets ordered to get info from a computer.

[–] jballs 3 points 8 months ago

My dad lost his left arm in 1996

If you manage to find it, you could still probably use it for counting. Just make sure to use a Clorox wipe on it first.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There's a few tricks you can do in overclocking where you replace shunt resistors. It bypasses power limit protections by making the board think it's drawing less power than it is.

That and replacing dead caps is about the only reason to touch a soldering iron to a GPU.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Only time I manually overclocket a PC was with a leaded pencil in the good ole days of AMD Thunderbird

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

How many times did you do it on the wrong side though?