When I lived in Pittsburgh, I got this huge 30″ Samsung monitor from Goodwill for a couple of bucks. It turned on and with no display connector attached, it runs through a color check. So, since the panel worked, I figured everything was fine and took it home.
It turns out these monitors are notorious for getting WAY too hot and basically melting the display driver FPGA off of the board. This manifests in a lot of artifacting when using the monitor, as well as flickering or banding once it gets really bad. A quick and dirty way that many internet users have dealt with this is to disassemble it, take out the display driver board, and reflow in your oven for a few minutes.
Since I keep a hot air gun on my desk, it was never too much of an issue to pull the whole thing apart and rework the chip when it stopped working correctly, but this definitely became more of a hassle the longer I used the monitor. My recommendation for reflowing is 7-10 minutes at 450F, making sure to evenly preheat before you start cooking the main chip. Then, it should work fine for a few days/weeks/months, potentially. I always found that this will only hold up for about 2-3 weeks with the stock cooling configuration if you use the monitor for more than a few hours daily.
Because it’s such a nice monitor, I set about trying to create a more permanent fix. My original plan was just to mount a heatsink on the FPGA to give it a little more breathing room. The only additional permanent modification this heatsink approach requires is cutting apart the EMI shielding on the back of the display driver mount, so that you can remove the junk cooling pads that were previously in place (only on the FPGA!) and replace with thermal compound and a real heatsink. With just the heatsink and no active cooling, it worked for several months without issue, but eventually succumbed to the same fate as before.
Recently, I have added a small fan to the case, pulling air directly through a channel behind the center of the monitor. It’s a small 12V fan from a server power supply (both very easy and cheap to get, with wonderful specs by the way). Inside, there are a few voltage rails we can just hijack for our own use by soldering on some bodge wires. Since the fan was rated for 12V, I hooked it up between the 24 and 18V rails on the first go. However, I forgot how loud server fans are, for how compact they are. I later hooked it up so the fan has about a 6V bias, which leads to quieter operation, while still pulling enough air to keep the FPGA from driving itself loose. If you can get ahold of a beater server power supply, use the small fans from there. They fit perfectly snug without any additional adhesive and are damped enough by the casing that you don’t hear any rattling or anything like that. Otherwise, there really isn’t a lot of room inside and it might be difficult to find one that will fit. Another fan that I toyed with implementing are the flat fans used in laptops, that pull air in and then eject it normal to the intake direction. However, in that case, you need to find an especially small heatsink to allow for clearance, or else the back of the monitor case will not fit back on.
These monitors, when new, cost over a grand. You can still find them occasionally online for a few hundred bucks, but I think the real reason you don’t see a lot of them is that the people who have them love it. It’s one of the largest computer monitors I’ve ever seen, with fantastic colors and contrast, as well as a super high resolution. It doesn’t take much work to keep them in working order, so I would recommend this mod to keep them out of the landfill and on your desk, where it belongs.
