- Joined
- Jan 31, 2006
- Location
- Roanoke, VA
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What was your procedure... what components did you pull off the board, and what did you leave?
this image shows basically all the work done to the motherboard. i removed pieces that were protecting the motherboard. i was able to reuse all of them when reassembling the laptop. i did bake the board with the gpu/cpu sockets facing up instead of down.
the gpu heatsink also had a piece of foil on it instead of just TIM...i was told it was designed this way to help accomodate tolerances in the build quality. i noticed it was fairly off center too...so i just removed it and cleaned the heatsink completely, swapped some washers so i could get better pressure between the gpu/heatsink surface and threw some thermal paste on it. i did a test mount and got perfect coverage of the gpu die. i think initial heatsink installation may have contributed to the premature failure of the graphics chip.
i hope this fix lasts a long time... ive only had the computer on for more than 16 hours now since its been fixed. i did run the resident evil benchmark for around 30 minutes total and my temps maxed at 65c on the cpu and 63c on the gpu.... i plan on running some more 3d intensive apps once i get the software side of things squared away.
One more thing, my oven can heat from below , from above or both. Which should I use? Going to be baking gpu side up like Haste266.
The problem isnt how long it will run continuously, but how many times it can be cycled (powered on, used, and then powered off) before it quits again. These HP's have serious problems with BGA solder cracks. A proper reflow, in conjunction with a cooling fix is needed to fix these long term. Actually a reball would be even better.
I've used solid copper pennies (1982 and older), sanded smooth on both sides to replace the thick thermal pads. This dropped the temps considerably, but i'm still not sure how long it will last.
In short, these laptops are hard to fix long term without special equipment. However the one you have, with separate video chip has a better chance than ones without. The heatsink for the video is separate from the CPU heatsink, and thus runs cooler. The other problem however, is that the nvidia northbridge shares the heatsink with the cpu. Hopefully, since the video load isnt handled by the northbridge, the heat will then be low enough to pevent too many problems. I have found the DV9000 series with intel chipsets, and nvidia video more reliable after repair because of the separate heatsinks. But these things REALLY need better cooling.
Think this would work on the failed 7800 GT GO in my laptop?
The laptop display still works, but the system doesn't recognize the video card anymore. I could theoretically go from a partially dead to a fully dead laptop, so I do have something to lose in this case, lol.
Un ****in believable. HAHAHAH
It worked. HAHA Baked the mobo booted to gateway screen, no artifacts, booted right into windows. I just sat there looking at it, saying holy ****. Wow, took some pics with my phone if you all want I'll poste em up later. I was sure this ****ing laptop which cost me $1200 would be an expensive paperweight. Thanks for all your help guys.
After hemming and hawing I decided to give it a shot. Taking the whole assembly apart and putting back together properly took more time and effort than the baking. I went from a fully dead graphics card to a partially dead graphics card. The system recognized an unknown graphics device (yay!), but after installing the latest nVidia drivers the screen randomly goes blank every couple seconds (booooo).
I gotta say, the solid copper case the video board sits in is sexy as hell.
Too bad it didn't work, maybe it needs to be double baked.