Solder connections on processors seem to be a very common failure point in modern electronics. Consider the Red Ring of Death (RRoD) on Xbox 360 or the Yellow Light of Death (YLoD) on PlayStation 3. This time around the problem is a malfunctioning Nvidia GPU on an HP Pavilion TX2000 laptop. The video is sometimes a jumbled mess and other times there’s no video at all. If the hardware is older, and the alternative to fixing it is to throw it away, you should try to reflow the solder connections on the chip.

This method uses a heat gun, which we’ve seen repair PCBs in the past. The goal here is to be much less destructive and that’s why the first step is to test out how well your heat gun will melt the solder. Place a chunk of solder on a penny, hold the heat gun one inch above it and record how long it takes the solder to flow. Once you have the timing right, mask off the motherboard (already removed from the case) so that just the chip in question is accessible. Reflow with the same spacing and timing as you did during the penny test. Hopefully once things cool down you’ll have a working laptop or gaming console again.

Recently, research students at Georgia Tech released a report outlining the dangers that GPUs pose to the current state of password security. There are a number of ways to crack a password, all with their different pros and cons, but when it comes down to it, the limiting factor in all of these methods is processing complexity. The more operations that need to be run, the longer it takes, and the less useful each tool is for cracking passwords. In the past, most recommendations for password security revolved around making sure your password wasn’t something predictable, such as “password” or your birthday. With today’s (and tomorrows) GPUs, this may no longer be enough.

Although the article never mentions them by name, the newest tools in password cracking are based around two tools, nVidia’s CUDA and AMD’s Stream SDKs. These tools allow programs to be written in C that can be broken up and utilize the parallel nature of the hardware that is usually optimized for graphics. GPUs are much better at large-scale mathematical operations than CPUs because of this parallel layout. Chances are, if you have a somewhat recent graphics card, it is probably compatible with either CUDA or Stream, and if you already know C, you have all the tools necessary to get started.

The lesson to learn here, the longer or more complex a password is, generally the safer it is. Because of this, a number of tools, both software and hardware, may become more and more popular, or necessary, to accommodate this need.

According to the an article in the INQUIRER, it is very possible that all chips with the G84 and G86 architecture are faulty. The problem is said to be excessive heat cycling and when NVIDIA was questioned, they blamed their suppliers for the issue. Although NVIDIA is claiming that only a few chips that went to HP were affected, the INQUIRER points out that all the chips use the same ASIC across the board, which has not changed in the architecture’s lifetime. They also point out that Dell and ASUS are having the same issues.

The article then goes on to theorize why we have not seen more complaints. They say that failures of these type usually follow a bell curve distributed over the time domain and we are only on the initial up-slope. This is probably due to the different use patterns of the users. For example, people with laptops are turning their computers on and off more than desktop users, thus facilitating the heat cycling’s effect. They suggest the quick fix as more fanning, but eventually NVIDIA will have to do something about this.

[via Engadget]

[via PhotoBasement]