What is re-balling and does it work?
I’m near the point of throwing my 2009 MacBook Pro off the end of Blackpool Pier. It started having screen glitches and random ‘lock-ups’, which apparently are the symptoms of the Nvidia graphics fault. I also found it would refuse to boot up fully (the progress bar would get about a quarter way across, pause, and then reboot continually). Apple quoted me £450 to have a new logic board fitted, so instead I went to an independent repairer to have the graphics processor re-balled. I have spent £89 on a ‘re-balling’ repair plus another £45 to have a new graphics processor fitted. After the first repair the graphics seemed OK, but the rebooting problem still occurred randomly. That’s when it went back for a new Nvidia processor to be fitted. For about two weeks it behaved flawlessly until on a cold day I got it out of the boot of my car and took it with me to a coffee shop. Yes, you guessed it, it just continually rebooted making it completely unusable! I don’t suspect Yosemite, because it still exhibits this fault when trying to boot from an external HDD loaded with Mavericks. Mike O'Dea
Re-balling involves desoldering a chip from the circuit board and applying a new grid of tiny solder balls to the underside to reattach all the pins. Theoretically it can fix problems with dry solder joints, but in practice it’s not something I recommend. Screen glitches and random crashes could indicate a fault with the graphics chip, but there could equally be a fault with one of the other chips on the motherboard, or one of the etched tracks on the circuit board itself. Also the re-balling process involves applying a lot of heat to the whole motherboard, which stresses chips and can cause other connections to fail.
Now that you are £134 in, it might be tempting to persevere with other repair options, or even pay the £450 for a new motherboard. My advice though, is to eBay the MacBook Pro “for parts or not working”. You should get at least £100 for it and you can put that towards a new laptop. Five or six years is a respectable lifespan for a laptop and there comes a point where you are just throwing good money after bad.