Make sure you practice on some old hardware 1st.

+1 I used an old P5Q Dlx that died. Made me a lot more confident when it came time to mod. I hadn't soldered in years.

Me being the idiot I am went to work on the GPU I was going to mod thinking it was easier than it looked. HAHA, I learned the hard way.

Laptop mobo's are a good practice arena. Everything is nice and tiny. removing/replacing tiny stuff and attaching the wires to resistors on a crowded lappy board makes graphics cards look spacious :D

Oh, and almost forgot to mention good tweezers... friggin' things are essential.

Here is a pic of my mod station. It's messy as hell but it's home. :)
Attachment 2158

I have:

Cheapo 25w iron
.022 silver solder
Radio Shack tip cleaner and tinner
desoldering braid
old IDE cable for wires
double sided tape

I have this for the home exercise:

http://www.hexaconelectric.com/images/totpic.jpg

and also something similar to this baby at work. Limitless soldering since everything is the size of a football field :D

http://www.kenthe.com/co/upload/2005...6418526431.jpg

WTF do you do for a living HITandRUN?

I'm a engineer working for a big printed circuit board manufacturer and these are the solder rework benches we have. Lucky me they let a NOOB like me use them! :D

cool station OC :)

what card is that? 8 series?