welp you wouldn't bake it, you would heat up the dye only with a heat gun
baking the whole thing is obv dumb cause you melt various components that weren't designed to withstand 250c

surely checking the power delivery with a multimeter before you shock it to life is advisable but you need schematics and some understanding of electronics. take it to an electronics repair shop if possible, most even have a 'can't fix it, you don't pay' policy.

250c is pretty hot, iirc you'd do lower just to reset the solders? Still never been brave enough to try it lol..

in the pc shop I worked we had an electrical engineer come once or twice a week and he mostly dealt with malfunctioning laptops, but occasionally he'd get a gpu to fix
so first he looked up the schematics of the card, pick up the multimeter and test stuff for a couple of minutes (mosfets, chokes, idk nobody else knew wtf he was doing), check the solder balls, then if he didn't find anything wrong, he would freeze the card for half an hour (we had a freezer for fast chilling beers ofc), take it out and test it again and then he'd proceed to covering up the outside of the dye with tin foil and he would heat it up to 250c with a heat gun for a few minutes. pretty much every card worked after the reflowing (heat) but it it's not exactly a permanent fix so we would only give the customer a 1 month warranty. I've heard some cards keep working for years, some die in a week, we had no way of knowing. the process can be repeated a few times I guess but we'd just pay the people the money back if they brought it back not working in <1 month

I wish I could perform magic like that

you can try the freeze + 5-10 mins of a hair dryer on max held very close to the dye. can't hurt.

got excited seeing a ryzen 3700 system for sale on fb for... $350!!

asked for pics of specs in windows, cpu is listed as fx6300 -_-

dont need another computer but if it were real at that price, def woulda jumped on it

You and about 500 people more, I guess.

I've been viewing some youtube videos of people troubleshooting GPUs and repairing them with with the reflow method

The magic of the multimeter consist of trying to find shortcuts on the PCB and measuring resistances and/or voltages between ground and certain points

Long time UK 2+2er here looking for some advice with regards to an internet security issue so please feel free to tell me to F off if this is the wrong forum.

Basically a family member was sent an anonymous message via Facebook messenger. They have since blamed the message on another family member and claimed their friend, who is a policeman, managed to find out the IP address and then the postcode 'off the books' which then matched that of the accused. The postcode matched, not the IP.

From everything I have read online it is impossible for anyone to obtain that sort of information from a Facebook message? I understand the police could get this information direct from FB and then the ISP but this is certainly something they could never do 'off the books' for a friend.

Any feedback at all would be much appreciated as this has created a lot of family drama!

My numbers here relate to the footnotes above:

1) I do not think that Facebook has a feature to send or receive anonymous messages.

2) Facebook certainly does not reveal the IP address of message senders easily.

3) IP addresses do not link to postcodes, this isn't even coherent

4) lol, no. Facebook doesn't even do searches for the ****ing NSA or MI5 'off the books', so let me give you the hot tip that they're not doing it for your British cop mate.

Cheers mate. I was 99% sure the story was fabricated but for my own piece of mind was looking for second opinion.

I should have said the message was from a fake account rather than anonymous account but same principles apply. Thanks again.

agree w josem. i assumed a fake account, and even then, how are you gonna match an ip to an "address" of a fake name? and iirc, ive never in 13 years supplied my address to facebook at all.

It wasn’t that the address was supplied to FB but rather they were able to obtain the IP address from the account sending the message and then from that able to link the IP to a post code.

From everything I know, which is limited, it is impossible to identify the IP address used to send the message. In addition to this, as Josem points out, it makes no sense that they can then link an IP address to a specific postcode.

When I led* PokerStars' teams for investigating people who were trying to play from the USA, there were significant problems in even confidently connecting from an IP address to a country. IP addresses do not neatly map to geographic locations (which makes sense; they're IP addresses, not geographic addresses) even at the national level, let alone a far more granular level like state/city/suburb, and talk of linking it to UK postcodes** which might be connected to just 10 or 50 houses? Absolutely, completely, entirely, absurd.

There is other technology for locating devices (eg, obviously when you use Google Maps on your phone, it can figure where you are to a few metres!) but that mostly is not IP addresses.


*Seems like a lifetime ago!

**In a nation like USA or Australia or much of the world, postcodes relate to relatively large geographic areas. In the UK and British Crown Dependencies, they relate to a handful of addresses. For example, my home postcode in the Isle of Man is IM1 5BL, which is a postcode shared by just ~13 residences, but my Australian postcode as a child was 3145, which was shared by thousands of residences.

Thanks for the info mate, it really is very much appreciated.

Ryzen CPUs are available dirt cheap
Ryzen 2600 80€
Ryzen 3600 110€

The problem is that I already have a spare CPU and no graphics cards to build systems with

don't you think G series Ryzens systems would sell well now? can play rather demanding games @1080p low/mid settings no prob if you give it fast dual channel ram and a board with good power delivery

They generally sell decently well. I have sold 5 of them and currently have one for sale for 320€ (3200g, 2*8GB 3200MHz, SSD 480) for about two weeks.

I sold my gaming system quicker (Ryzen 1600AF, RX 470, 2*8 GB 2133 MHz, SSD480, Seasonic 430W psu) for 430€

The APU's aren't easy to find now, btw. Their price has gone up as well.

ye I guess you'll have to take a break unless you get lucky digging for used cards

Bought a GTX 1070 for 271€ shipped.

Let's see if the seller actually ships, because decent chance he'll get a better offer, even if he accepted mine. He can simply not ship and in 5 days I'll get my mannies back

this escrow service is a bit weird if you ask me
what happens if you get something that doesn't work? you send it back on your cost and then can't he just say you sent him a different item back and **** you over with disputes forever? I got burned on paypal more than once with this ****...
over here they just ship and you pay cash or card to the courier after he lets you open the package and see you got what you ordered
that being said, some sellers ask for 5 eur in advance for shipping, just in case you don't collect and not everyone ships, even after you give em the 5 eur, so risk is on you and it's often a waste of time talking to weirdos

Wallapop actually works quite well.

If you receive something that doesn't work, you file a complaint. If the seller accepts, the goods are returned with the site providing a barcode that allows free shipping. After seller receives back the goods, buyer gets the money back, including the original shipment costs. Nobody loses a cent.

Of course, this can be exploited (For example, I sell a laptop, buyer returns and instead of returning the laptop, he sends me back the mobile phone that we agreed to swap for the laptop), but I'm pretty sure if you are involved in too many returns, they will do something about it.

Follow-up: I bought another R9 290 for pretty cheap (100€ shipped), so now can stab a b0rken and a working R9 290 with my multimeter and lets see what I can find.

The problem with these videos on youtube that explain how to analyze a broken GPU is that they don't tell you where/what resistances/voltages are the correct value and the best way, i figured, is to have a working counter example.

Are you able to replace surface mount components if you do find a bad one?
If not, I'd save the time on probing around and sell it for parts if oven reflow doesn't work/isn't an option.

Symptoms seem like fractures in GPU BGA solder, oven reflow is your best shot at fixing that yourself. Modern commodity electronics are oven soldered, so risk to other components on the board (once the cooler and thermal grease/tape has been removed) is not zero but should be manageable.

I don't know if I could replace bad components, I just do it for my info and entertainment.

The R9 290 is insane, I cleaned it up and put fresh MX-4 and it switched off due to temperature in the startup screen of Fortnite after a couple of minutes.

I'm going to have to poke around to undervolt it, increase the ventilator spèed and maybe permanently hack that into the BIOS, if I can found out how to do that. Or get a better cooler, because the original one sucks balls (and is know for sucking balls)

if you have access locally to a decent electronics repair shop, give it a go, they shouldn't charge you much and they normally wouldn't charge you anything if they can't fix it. call before, ask about their fees and warranty/policy.