Transistor broke off from videocard

Hey guys,
I found this forum by accident while hunting for help... see lots of helpful post around so figured I'd join up.

I was cleaning thermal adhesive off of my ATI 9700 vidcard's GPU and ran a Q-tip over one of the transistors (think it's a transistor... tiny little rectangular thing) near the GPU. The transistor ripped right off (can't find it either). Any way to repair something like that? Thanks for any and all help in advance.

Here's what I'm talking about.

hmm tricky thing...

I think it would be near impossible to replace that. The machines that print things like that are soo accurate at making the tracks, holes and components in the right places so I think a persons hand and a soldering iron would be too wobbly, large, et al...

HTH,
computer

ya, i'm thinking it's prolly not possible... the things are TINY lol.

i would use this as a excuse to upgrade, cards are getting cheaper by the day, you can get a radeon 9000 64 meg ddr card around $70 us at places like best buy, wal-mart,...ect. and nvidia has a 64 meg ddr around $50 us,but i would use this as the, well,,,i dont want to buy another one for a while, let me atleast get the 256meg ddr

He's talking about breaking a Radeon 9700, which is far from a cheap card (certainly higher class than anything you can spend <$200 on these days). Is it new enough, by chance, you can claim warranty? And have you plugged it in to see if...works without it? (bah! useless parts... [OT] I dropped my electric razor and now there's something loose and rattling inside, but it still works, so it must not have been too important [/OT]) Probably not the best of ideas, but if you've got no other way to fix it, might as well try.

I'd call ATI and tell them the vid card just died one day, and after spending an hour on it, he pulled it out and inspected it... and found that a transistor had simply fallen off.

I'd bet $5 he gets it replaced by ATI.

when i first posted on this, i didnt notice the model number of the card, just assumed it was a older card that had been really hot, but if it is that new i bet CelticLegend is right they will replace it, i wouldnt even bother explaining, just tell them, "it dont work" if you get to technical about it and tell them what is wrong with it they start to suspect things.

The card is about 6 months old or so, so technically still under manufacturer warranty timelimit. But... I removed all of ATI's stock thermal goop and the shim surrounding the GPU and the adhesive that held it in place. They'd be able to tell I mucked with it immediately. Although, if I was devious enough I guess I could paste it all back together and return it to the store LOL.

I did try to run it after it broke just to see (on an old monitor of course) if it would work. It's ok for about 30 seconds or so then the screen gets progressively more and more scrambled.

lol, must have been important.

Hell, if you bought it retail, they'll never know the difference. I know a guy that disassembled and destroyed (via hammer) a TI-81 Calculator, then returned it to Walmart in the box he bought his TI-89 in. Suprisingly, they took it without question. So your little snafu of a transistor falling off (which they shouldn't do without considerably effort) is minor enough to likely be unnoticable.

LOL I can barely see the thing's broken off and I know what to look for.

I need to paste that shim back on with something, it looked like a ceramic paste with some silver edges, maybe a cheap version of ceramique or likewise.