Yea I used 63/37 and no clean flux.
He was always aware of the repair attempt. It’s how I initiated the return. I showed evidence of a previous repair gone bad.
I did not intend to repair it. It actually never crossed my mind. I disassembled it because it was easy to do so and I disassemble everything I get to see how it works. This big 1cm x 1cm square was hanging off. Only one of 2 pads was attached. And I was looking at it thinking “did I do that dissembling it or was it like that and the cause for failure here?”
I snapped a picture sent it to him. Asked him why he told me it hadn’t been repaired and always worked. I initially accused him of lying to me and demanding a return, to which he capitulated. I believe him now l, and feel bad for the tough tone I took, but I don’t think it was unfair or unwarranted. I will always get mad if something is represented as new or like new and obviously not. He did reveal that he was not the first owner, which is not what he initially told me. So yea it’s convoluted.
Like, I said, if I believe him, and I lean that way right now, but it’s eBay and the internet and faceless so who knows- but he apparently bought it on eBay a year prior from a guy and sold it when he upgraded. I am operating on the assumption that it became detached in the mail. However, it’s completely possible he started experiencing problems and decided to dump it. The card worked- it was just unstable - crashing whenever it was under load. But it worked enough for a less honest person to claim it was “working” and tell himself it’s just old. Plus, depending on orientation, connection may have been intermittent. So I don’t know the true story, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
I was upset with him because after asking about the card- and him reassuring me the card worked perfectly for him- I went and bought a new power supply, a new motherboard, and new ram. All of which were used parts but are now new. I had reasons to expect each. There were around 20 hrs of troubleshooting before I Ilse’s confident it was the GPU. So saving a few hundred on eBay at this point has cost me several hundred more. And I don’t want to hear about eBay - blah blah. It’s a risk I know. But it’s priced in. I never assume anything is fully legitimate on eBay. But some items are good deals, though it’s certainly caveat emptor. If you’re patient and you’ve truly been had, you always get your money back. I’ve had a slew of bad deals on eBay, but also a slew of things that cost 50% or less and worked out fine. So it’s a net win. Used PC components are vastly cheaper- unless there is something special about them. It’s like a car- once you open that retail packaging, you lose 30% value right away. Anyway, yea I knew it was a risk. But at $300 for a 3 year old/ generation old card that performed like a card that was (then) selling for $800-$900 new (height of the shortage https://camelcamelcamel.com/EVGA-GeForce-GAMING-Support-08G-P4-5173-KR/product/B01KVZBNY0?active=amazon&context=search due to the DDR ram conspiracy The RAM price conspiracy — Steemit -the 3 companies that make up 94% of supply were restricting production to drive up price and peaking Cryptocurrency prices which is mined by GPUs or App Specific ICs). Except bitcoin was out (too difficult - too expensive - the avg number of calculations to win a coin had skyrocketed) and there was no ASIC for coins based on ethereum at the time (still not but coming soon) so everyone was seeing the 15Dec- Jan 18 peak in prices and thinking they too would join the goldrudh.
Anyway, long story short. I paid a great price. I realized after extensive research that the 980 Ti- performed as well as the 3rd tier (maybe 4 Th 1070ti, 1080, 1080tinand Titan xp. Risk appeared acceptable.
I don’t play games, but in the course of all this I got interested in the other things you can do with the card. That combined with a demo of VR looking at congenital heart disease and we were interested in doing something similar maybe. The other surgeons really enjoyed it. It seems like a fun project.