DIY laptop video chip repair

This guide will focus on warming up chips at home. This operation often helps in cases when the laptop refuses to turn on or is experiencing other serious problems with the chipset or video card.

This measure serves to diagnose a malfunction with a particular chip. It temporarily allows you to restore the functionality of the chip. To solve the problem, you usually need to replace the chip itself or the entire board.

Problems with the operation of the chipset (the chipset is one or two large microcircuits on the motherboard) are manifested in the malfunctioning of various ports (USB, SATA, etc.) and the laptop's refusal to turn on. Problems with a video card are usually accompanied by image defects, errors after installing drivers from the video chip manufacturer's website, as well as the laptop's refusal to turn on.

Similar problems are very common in laptops with defective video cards. nVidia 8-seriesas well as with chipsets nVidia... This primarily concerns the chipset MCP67which is used in laptops Acer Aspire 4220, 4520, 5220, 5520, 7220 and 7520.

What is the point of warming up? It's actually pretty simple. Often the reason for the malfunctioning of chips is a violation of the contact between the chip and the board. When the chip heats up to 220-250 degrees, the contacts of the chip with the substrate and the substrate with the motherboard are soldered. This allows you to temporarily restore the functionality of the chip. “Temporarily” in this case very much depends on the specific case. It can be days and weeks, or months and years.

This guide is intended for those whose laptop no longer works and, in general, have nothing to lose. If your laptop works, then it is better not to interfere with it and close this manual.

1) The most correct way is to use a soldering station. They are mainly used in service centers. Temperature and airflow can be precisely controlled there. This is how they look:

Since soldering stations at home are extremely rare, you will have to look for other options.

A useful thing, it is inexpensive, you can buy it without any problems. It is also possible to warm up the chips with a construction hairdryer. The main challenge is temperature control. That is why, for the task of warming up the chip, you need to look for a hair dryer with a temperature controller.

3) Warming up the chips in a conventional oven. An extremely dangerous way. It is better not to use this method at all. The danger is that not all components on the board can handle heat well. There is also a high risk of overheating the board. In this case, not only the performance of the components of the board may be disrupted, but they can also be trivially soldered from it and fall off. In these cases, further repairs are meaningless. You need to buy a new board.

This guide will cover heating the chip at home using a hair dryer.

1) Building hair dryer. Requirements for it are low. The most important requirement is the ability to smoothly adjust the outlet air temperature to at least 250 degrees. The thing is that we will need to set the outlet air temperature at the level of 220-250 degrees. In hair dryers with step adjustment, 2 values ​​are often found: 350 and 600 degrees. They don't suit us. 350 degrees is already a lot to warm up, not to mention 600. I used a hair dryer like this:

2) Aluminum foil. It is often used in cooking for baking in the oven.

3) Thermal paste. It is needed to put the cooling system back together. Reuse of old thermal interfaces is not allowed.If the cooling system has already been removed, then when installing it back, the old thermal grease must be removed and a new one applied. What kind of thermal paste to take is discussed here: Laptop cooling. I recommend thermal pastes from ThemalTake, Zalman, Noctua, ArcticCooling and others like Titan Nano Grease. KPT-8 needs to be taken original in a metal tube. It is often faked.

I used Titan nano grease:

4) A set of screwdrivers, napkins and straight arms.

Warning: Chip warm-up is a difficult and dangerous operation. Your actions can change the state of the laptop from “slightly not working” to “not working at all”. Moreover, further repair of a laptop in a service center after such an intervention may be economically impractical. Excessive heat, static electricity, and other similar things can ruin a laptop. It should also be borne in mind that not all components tolerate high heat well. Some of them may even explode.

If you doubt your abilities, then it is better not to take up the heating of the chip and entrust this operation to the service center. Everything that you do in the future, you do at your own peril and risk. The author of this manual does not bear any responsibility for your actions and their results.

Before starting to warm up the chips, you need to have a clear idea of ​​which chips need to be heated. If you have a problem with a video card, then you need to warm up the video chip, if with a chipset, then the north and / or south bridges (in the case of MCP67 North and South bridges are combined in one microcircuit). The Laptop Repair guide and these forum topics will help you in this matter: Laptop and Video Card Won't Turn On.

When you more or less imagine which chips need to be warmed up, then you can take on the heating itself. It starts with disassembling the laptop. Before disassembling the laptop, be sure to remove the battery and unplug the laptop from the power supply. You can find instructions on how to disassemble your laptop model on the first page of this topic: Instructions for laptops.

This is how the chipset microcircuits and video chips might look like:

In the photo above, the south bridge microcircuit is located at the bottom left, the north bridge microcircuit is located at the top right of the center, the processor connector is located to the left of it.

For example, a laptop motherboard Acer Aspire 5520G:

Here the microcircuits of the north and south bridges are combined in one - MCP67... It is located in the center of the photo, just above the processor socket.

Video cards can be either removable:

So soldered into the motherboard.

Before starting to warm up, it would be nice to take care of the thermal protection of the elements surrounding the chip. After all, they do not all tolerate heating above 200 degrees well. That's what we need foil for.

Warning: Handling foil greatly increases the risk of damage to components from static electricity. This must be remembered. Read more about antistatic protection here

We take a piece of foil and cut a hole in it along the contour:

In the case of warming up video cards in the form of small boards, you can simply put them on foil.

This is already needed more to protect the table from excessive heating. The heated board with the chip must be placed strictly horizontally.

Now you need to set the temperature on the hair dryer to about 220-250 degrees. The option from 300-350 degrees and higher is not suitable since there is a possibility that the solder under the chip will melt strongly and the chip will move under the influence of air currents. In this case, you cannot do without a service center.

It takes several minutes to warm. The hair dryer should be about 10-15 cm away from the chip. This is how this process looks in the video:

Here's another video on warming up with a hairdryer: download / download (warming up the video chip. Everything is shown in detail) download / download and download / download (warming up the video card with household hair dryers)

After such a warm-up, the patient (HP Pavillion dv5) came to life and started working

After warming up, we assemble the laptop and do not forget about replacing the thermal paste with a new one (Replacing the thermal paste in a laptop).

I ask you to state all questions on heating up the chips in this forum thread: Warming up the video card, chipset and other chips. Before asking questions, I urge you to read the topic.

Respectfully yours, the author of the material is Andrey Tonievich. The publication of this material is permitted only with reference to the source and with an indication of the author

Have you ever experienced your graphics card stopped working? God grant, of course, that this never happens, but still! What to do, for example, if you hear that the computer is booting, but there is no image on the monitor (black screen)?

What we usually do in such cases: substitute a known working video card (or switch to integrated video) and make sure that the problems are with the graphics adapter. But what to do in this case? Can we provide video card repair ourselves?

The good news is yes: DIY video card repair is quite possible! The bad thing is that after such a repair there is no guarantee that the video card restored in this way will work for a long time. Also, the repair itself may end unsuccessfully if we do not follow certain rules. But let's talk about everything in order! 🙂

So, we have a non-working video card from Nvidia, the GeForce 9500 GT model. Like this:

What's the problem? The video card worked for a long time in harsh temperature conditions, which led to its overheating. As a result of this, a fairly typical (in such cases) thing happened: the "dump" of the BGA chip of the video card.

Don't be scared by the word “dump”, nothing has fallen off there 🙂 This is just how the people call the electrical contact of the BGA balls array with the printed circuit board of the card that occurs as a result of prolonged overheating. Usually, this phenomenon occurs as a result of the presence of a small section of cold soldering, which is subjected to prolonged and strong heating.

This is not to say that this is a 100% marriage of the manufacturer: there can be quite a lot of tin balls in the array and the violation (or oxidation) of the contact of even one of them can lead to a complete (or partial) loss of the card's performance. So overheating, be it a video card or a central processor, is a very unpleasant thing. Try to avoid it in every possible way!

And in this situation, we have no choice but to try to repair the video card with our own hands, on our own. So, first of all, we need to take care to remove all plastic plugs on the card, stickers (stickers) located on the back side from the card. Anything in the area of ​​the graphics chip can melt.

Yes Yes! You heard right: to melt. After all, we will repair the video card by heating it and all the “unnecessary” must be removed, just for every fireman. Of course, perhaps nothing like this will happen, but just make it a habit - it will come in handy 🙂

We will also need to remove the fan and cooling system. We do this with whatever is more convenient for us. Personally, I use this screwdriver with interchangeable nozzles:

We unscrew the screws securing the fan, remove the metal cover and get the following picture:

As you can see, the cooling system requires thorough cleaning, and the fan itself needs preventive maintenance, since its efficiency has decreased due to lime adhered to the blades and dust crammed into the bearing.

The next step is to remove the GPU heatsink. It would seem: what is so difficult here? But, as one movie hero said in a film about various evil spirits: "There is a catch everywhere!" Here it lies in the fact that often (especially if the chip was operated in a severe temperature regime), when dry, the thermal paste tightly glues the crystal and the heatsink together.

It is categorically not recommended, in this case, to use heroic force and pull this matter upon yourself, or, as experience erroneously suggests, to pick something up! This can damage the crystal! There is a simpler and more elegant solution: we take a regular household hair dryer and slowly warm up the clutch area.

After a while (5-10 seconds), we begin to slightly shake the radiator from side to side, as in the photo above. Thermal paste, softening under the influence of temperature, will allow us to do this. Warming up this thing a little more, we can easily separate our radiator from the crystal:

Try as completely and as carefully as possible to clean both the "base" of the radiator and the crystal itself from the remnants of the old dried thermal paste. At the same time, try not to scratch the metal surface of the radiator (this will reduce its heat transfer coefficient). Do not scrape, it is better to warm up separately and wipe off the old paste.

With the crystal it is also as careful as possible: if it was not possible to remove some part of the paste (like mine, for example), then it is better to leave it. Anything that is erased - be sure to delete! Otherwise, the thermal paste, under the influence of temperature, will, as they say, “bake” and then it will be very difficult to remove it without damaging (chipping) the core itself.

Before we start repairing a video card with our own hands, let's take a closer look at the graphics chip.

Why did I highlight some of the areas in the photo above? See, the larger area is the graphics card chip itself, and the smaller area is the GPU die (GPU - graphics processing unit). Along the perimeter of the crystal, we see a white sealant (compound) that performs several functions: protects the crystal from dust getting under it and fixes it to the substrate.

What is the "trick" here and why repairing a video card with your own hands can end unsuccessfully, no matter what efforts we make? The area (array) of BGA solder balls is not only between the chip itself and the PCB textolite, but also between the crystal and the substrate graphics card!

Do you feel where I'm going? The harsh reality is that we can repair the video card ourselves (if we are still lucky) only if there is a violation of the contacts of the balls directly between the PCB and the substrate. If the “dump” occurred under the crystal, then we can hardly do anything about it. Even such an operation as reballing (complete replacement of an array of balls using a stencil) will not save in this case, since this procedure is performed only for the “bottom” of the entire chip, but not for the crystal!

So, I hope we have learned the necessary minimum of theory? Moving on! To repair a video card at home, we need a flux and a disposable syringe. I use the usual GFR (alcohol-canin), which is called “GFR-flux”.

We collect the substance in a syringe (about one cube). If it remains, it will be possible to drain back.

Note: You can use any other inactive (ideally neutral) flux. For example, "F1" or "F3". The original LTI-120 is also suitable. Although, with LTI, not everything is so simple: leave it as a last resort 🙂

We carefully apply the tip of the needle to the edge of the substrate, tilting it so that the flux we squeeze out of the syringe is under the chip. After pumping it, if necessary, tilt the card slightly so that it spreads well between the balls. Ideally, we want to achieve an effect where the liquid appears a little from all sides.

Advice: after use, rinse the syringe (just take several times of water from the tap and squeeze out through the needle). If this is not done, the rosin in the needle will dry out and clog it. It will take a long time to clean or throw away.

Now we can be sure that when heated, the flux will fulfill its function. Why fluxes are needed, what they are and how to use them correctly, we considered in a separate article, so we will not repeat ourselves.

After that, we can proceed directly to the repair of the video card with our own hands! To do this, we place it in such a way that we have free access to the GPU from above and below and, using a soldering station, we begin to heat the substrate around the perimeter.

Note: under no circumstances heat the crystal itself! It can fail!

How I do it, I’d better show you in video format, since you cannot clearly illustrate with photographs alone.

Now let's comment on this video a little. When you warm up the video card from below (under the chip), try to keep the hair dryer perpendicular to the plane of the PCB, otherwise I didn't manage to shoot and warm it at the same time. Also, be careful not to flare the small card components located on the back side (they can be easily shifted, given the heated solder underneath).

In the video above, I did not show the whole procedure, as you understand. The bottom must be heated long enough (3-5 minutes) so that the smoke from the flux, which you may have noticed, began to rise quite intensively above the board (this is evidence that the board has warmed up well). The first stage will be “boiling” and bubbling of the flux - this is normal.

Also, do not hesitate to warm up the place under the crystal itself (you can do this through the board). The main thing: do not hold the hair dryer in one place - smoothly move it over the area (to exclude places of local overheating of the surface). Keep the funnel of the hair dryer at a distance of 2-3 centimeters from the surface to be treated. I personally set the air flow to an average value, the temperature that the soldering station shows at the same time is 420-450 degrees Celsius. The second value is the limit for my "Ya Xun 880D".

The temperature spread here is due to the fact that its sensor itself is located directly in the handle of the hot air gun, and the air temperature at the outlet of the hot air gun is already different (lower). Plus, here you can add the inevitable heat loss due to the ability to absorb and dissipate heat by the treated surface itself, the temperature in the room, the proximity of the hair dryer to the heated area, the power of the air flow, etc. That is why only empirically it will be possible to select the exact value of the operating temperature (thermal profile) for a particular soldering station.

To what state should you warm up? Here, again, there are indirect signs by which we can navigate. The whole procedure takes approximately 5-8 minutes. The spread of time is due to the factors listed above. It also depends on the quality of the flux used, the type of solder from which the BGA array is made on a substrate (lead or lead-free). In the process of strong heating, the flux should evaporate (smoke) fairly decently.

Another important marker is the visual detection of the melting of the solder on the elements located on the chip around the die (usually a series of small SMD capacitors). When the solder "shines" on them, it is a sure sign that the balls of the substrate have reached their melting point, which is exactly what we need! For greater confidence, you can take tweezers in your free hand and try to slightly move the chip itself: gently push it (literally by a millimeter) to the side and you will see how it “wobbles” and, due to the forces of surface tension of the molten balls from below, will snap into place. After that, the heating can be safely stopped!

Note: some craftsmen, instead of a station, use a regular building hair dryer or repair the video card with their own hands, “baking” it in a household oven, after wrapping it in foil! Frankly, I am not a fan of such radical methods of "repair", although (if the guys succeed in everything), then why not? 🙂

During the heating procedure, you can monitor the surface temperature with a thermocouple or pyrometer (infrared thermometer). This will help in the future to better navigate in the selection of the correct thermoprofile.

Note: when cooling the video card (and any other element), do not use forced airflow - fan, etc.Let the part cool naturally, no need to "fit" it. We don't need the microcircuit to receive a thermal shock (shock), do we?

This is how you repair a video card with your own hands! Whether they were successful or not, we have yet to verify. To do this, we need to do a few mandatory things. Out of habit, I clean (where possible) the board from the flux residues. In this case, it is the rosin remaining after the evaporation of the alcoholic component. The rosin is neutral (it does not interact with the components of the board) and, in theory, it may not be necessary to wash it off, but, for the sake of order, let's go over it thoroughly with a brush and a cleaner.

We washed more or less (the rosin dissolved), let it dry and apply fresh thermal paste to the crystal (“KPT”, “AlSil” or “Zalman” - I respect):

Now we put the whole "constructor" back together (we fix the heatsink, screw on the cooler, connect it to the connector on the board).

Before installing the card into the system unit, let's go (just in case) with an elastic band over the contacts of the Pci Express connector and that's it - can you install a component on the motherboard to check what we've got?

But it turned out, as we can see, everything is not even bad. There is an image on the monitor! Do-it-yourself video card repair is possible! Of course, to be completely sure, we need to install the operating system (it was not at hand), install the video card driver and, ideally, run some kind of stress test for stability, which will show us, in the end, we managed to repair the video card ourselves or No?

Note: The free and easy-to-use tool "FurMark" can work very well for this test.

Otherwise anything can happen: the video card seems to work, but the driver is not installed or does not pass the stability test. Also, as you understand, we cannot give any guarantee for this type of "repair" and we do not know how long the device will work? But, as they say, on the other hand, we “pumped over the skill” of repairing video cards at home, and the client received a temporary working computer. We did what we could, and then there will be what should happen!

As always, I am waiting for your comments, feedback, constructive criticism below under the article 🙂

St. Petersburg Bolshoy Prospekt Petrogradskaya Storona building 100 office 305 phone (812) 922-98-73

Warming up the video adapter or laptop bridge is a temporary repair, but there are times when you need to restore the laptop to work for a while. In this case, the heating of the microcircuits helps.

List of works - Warm up the chip

After exposure to heat on the video card crystal, it comes to life and the video card works, the laptop starts up. However, the duration of work with such a repair is from one hour to one month. (And it is not necessary to say that I have warmed up and everything has been working for me for years, this is not true). As for video cards for desktop PCs, warming up helps here, the card will work much longer, but only in a mode far from the maximum allowable for this chip. It works, but if you want to load the map to the fullest, you will have a bummer.

Cost of work - Prices are indicated taking into account disassembly and assembly of the laptop

Warming up the chip on a laptop is justified if:

1. I need to transfer data
2. No money for repairs, the cost of replacing a chip is from 4000 rubles

Note that when the chip warms up, it is necessary to clean the cooling system and change the thermoplastic, so when the video card warms up with us, the cost of cleaning is included in the cost of warming up

Due to the high power consumption, the laptop requires a reliable power supply that produces "quality" watts. This means that universal power supplies are not quite suitable for a laptop with a "gaming" generation video card. We recommend using high quality power supplies. A non-licensed block can significantly reduce the life of a laptop and a video card in particular.

Cooler power
Oddly enough, it is always lacking, and overheating was the result of poor cooling.Therefore, laptop owners are strongly advised to timely change the thermoplastic and clean the cooling system. The most common cause of failure is the GPU BGA sphering. There are instances with a sealed or failed memory microcircuit, but quite rarely.

The elements get very hot, and since, according to the laws of physics, the metal expands with increasing temperature, numerous heating and cooling cycles just lead to the unsoldering of the contacts of the main microcircuits. The record holder for the number of failures is the video chip. Symptoms that the video adapter is out of order are visible right away - first of all, these are artifacts in games, unpleasant multi-colored ripples or even purple stripes all over the screen. It may be even worse - the signal is simply not displayed on the monitor. If this happens, you don't have to throw your laptop away and run to the store for a new one.

The lion's share of the breakdown of cards is due to the fact that the crystal is cracking and naturally, according to the laws of physics, when the plate is heated, the crystals converge, but for a while. It is impossible to determine with one hundred percent guarantee what happened, chip dump or crystal breakdown. In the event that the thermal shock helped, and it helps in any case, if the crystal is cracked, the chip will work for several days, maximum a month, and if a soldering dump occurs, then with proper heating, the chip will work much longer. Do not forget that any heating significantly reduces the life of the microcircuit, on average it is designed for 100,000 hours of operation. Heating will reduce the resource by 5 percent, incorrect heating by 50 percent. Amateur warming up will disable the motherboard.

The service workers are professionals, they will unsolder the GPU and re-assemble it with a new GPU. Your old chip will be given to you, for such work you will be asked from 6500 rubles. They will give a guarantee for their work for six months. Experience shows that such a repair is the most productive, the laptop video card, subject to all the recommendations, will work for a long time and efficiently.

We take a soldering or construction hair dryer, set the temperature to about 170 degrees and send it to the video adapter. We keep the hairdryer in this state for 9-10 minutes, after which we cool it and test it for performance. Before work, we remove the eboksidka, if there is one, we rinse it.
Attention!
There are small elements nearby, you don't have to think that they are there just like that, these are elements of various circuits, damage that will lead to the inoperability of the laptop. Excessive thermal shock can lead to the fact that delamination will occur, you will be led away by the characteristic cotton, and the formation of a bubble in the place of heating. In 95% of cases, the body will have to be changed.

IR - lamp is used specifically for desoldering chips, allows you to set the desired area of ​​the working surface and temperature. Place two pieces of metal between the chip and the motherboard, since the GPU is heavy, and when the high temperature melts the BGA balls, they can spread out under the force of gravity, which will lead to complete inoperability.
Attention!
The metal plate must be placed so that it does not touch the BGA pins, and at the same time, lies tightly between the GPU and the board. Otherwise, the metal can simply be soldered to the contacts. When exposing the chip to a hair dryer, it is not necessary to use plates, the relatively low operating temperature of the hair dryer, 170 degrees, will not allow the contacts to melt completely. However, you need to be prepared for the fact that, due to the high temperature, other elements of the device - capacitors or diodes - may unsolder and "float".

Some craftsmen, in the absence of an infrared lamp, use an ordinary oven for this - such a peculiar, artisanal method of repair. However, in this case, there is a great risk that the contacts of other elements of the device will be unsoldered and tiny transistors will float from their places.
The originals advise, instead of the oven and other extreme methods, to simply press the contacts harder with another cooling system, tightening the fastening bolts tighter. Success can only be guaranteed if you are 100% sure that the problem is precisely in the GPU pads.

It is not necessary to re-solder the BGA ball, because it simply moved away from the PCB, and if you press it firmly, it will snap into place, and the board will work normally again. To do this is as easy as shelling pears - just lay spacers between the chip and the surface of the cooling system, then screw it tightly to the board. This method is relatively safe, since you do not exert any thermal effect on the board and the chip, and you simply press the chip while simultaneously “upgrading” the cooling system.
The risk of such an operation is that you can destroy the crystal by excessively pinching it, or bend the board, as a result of which it will simply crack. The repair process will definitely not be possible.

As sad as it may sound, if the device is out of order, it means that its time has already expired. Having performed the above operations, you can extend the life of the chip only for a certain period of time - it is not known what will happen next. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to make it exist longer and work stably if, after the repair, you follow simple rules:

Regularly clean the cooling system The walls of the laptop case form a real thermal box, in which the temperature of components without proper cooling will rise, which will also negatively affect the health of the motherboard. Third, forget about "overclocking" performance. Today, there are enough modern laptop cards even for games. But "overclocking" adding a couple of extra FPS can easily ruin the card. The increased voltage on the core and the increased clock frequencies cause the chip to heat up more, as a result of which the contacts can be torn off again.

Still have questions? Contact us by phone: +7 (812) 922 98 73

They gave me an old RoverBook Voyager V551L for services, but not a working one, there was no image. Through simple tests, it became clear that the beech itself is alive, but does not display a picture. Of course, there was no 100% certainty, but I decided to take a chance (hehe, only 1000 rubles) and ordered a new video chip, but not the same G86-603-A2, but took it from reviews on the forums G86-631-A2. It seems to be more stable, a little more productive, it heats up less. Although what I mean, here is an ancient beech with an ancient iron 🙂

It is almost in perfect condition, there are no cracks, the attachments are ALL intact, the body is thick and durable, bluetooth, wifi, 56k modem (olol), camera and microphone, three USB ports, a card reader, even the battery is not worn out (though one fig with it is cut down through minute). The 15.4 display pleases, the working resolution is 1280 × 800, pleasant soft colors. But there is a significant disadvantage - cooling through the fifth point is implemented, for viduha, north and south bridges, it is common and passive. As a result, working t vidyahi 70 degrees. Core2Duo T5500 is smart for surfing in the net, but it gets very hot, and its temperature changes instantly: it was only 80, now 65. Xs, is it conceived ... For all this, nothing slows down and runs briskly. It's a pity only for the 1Gb memory, someone has already pulled out the bar. The screw also did not get, I had to put my own.

Replacing the chip.
Before that, a 150W halogen floodlight was purchased, it is now difficult to find them, only LEDs. I built a small platform so that the motherboard rests on it with its edges, and does not lie on the spotlight itself. I made two trial watering from a dead motherboard. Then he put it down from the rover, put the chip on the seat, and he just doesn't want to go to bed. It turned out that he had badly cleaned the pad from the solder. I had to go through the soldering iron.

Then he wiped the seat and the chip with acetone, smeared it with a thin layer of RMA-223-UV flux. I put and centered the chip, turned on the spotlight and let the board warm up for a couple of minutes.

Then he began to heat the chip in a circle with a 300 g soldering hairdryer and an average flow rate. Within a couple of minutes, he sat down smoothly.I pushed lightly with a toothpick and made sure that the chip "floats". Everything. He turned off the spotlight and left it to cool. I made sure that the chip sat down exactly on all sides.

Collected and installed the system. Everything seems to be fine.

Cons of my collective farm.
- There is no question of thermoprofile and temperature control in general, so as not to injure mikruhi once again and not to deform the board. It would be possible at least to control the temperature with a multimeter with a thermal sensor, but he did not have time to arrive, I had to do it by eye.
- What is the quality of the purchased chip? They say now it is almost impossible to find the original.
- It seems that the flux there needs a different, thicker and lead free.

py.sy. I put a seven with transparencies turned on. Damn it flies. Only memory is not enough for him, he must look for a bar. This is the first experience of replacement.

Do-it-yourself laptop repair. The built-in graphics card is broken.

More and more people are using laptops today. They are very convenient, but unfortunately not as reliable as desktop computers, and I want to share my problem, or rather its solution.

In my old laptop (Rover Voyager V554WH), the monitor screen began to periodically display graphic artifacts on the monitor and freeze, and then it always began to split the monitor image into 6 identical parts - that is, there were 6 small desktops on the monitor, etc., in all 6 there was a nasty 16 bit image and stripes.

Having crawled the Internet in search of a solution to my problem, I realized that my problem is very common, especially among owners of an integrated video card with an nVidia video chip. This video chip is used not only in the Rover Voyager V554WH laptop, but also in other models from different manufacturers. The reason for the breakdown is the high temperature of the laptop, which is not high enough to break the processor, but enough to break the video chip. Just do not scold the laptop manufacturers, this is actually not their mistake, although they are responsible for it.

The fact is that nVidia has released a bad video chip, it is enclosed in a BGA - a case that is afraid of linear expansion associated with a change in temperature, is afraid of a shake-up. sissy in general, but found out about it too late.

So the main problem of laptop breakdown in my situation is high temperature and a dead video chip.

The built-in video card could burn out, its contacts could burst, or the soldering could go away (I read that it is lead-free for some reason).

I searched the entire Internet in search of a solution to the problem, but I only came across articles in which service centers and repairmen wrote that such a breakdown CANNOT be repaired at home, and even if you get the right equipment, a person without the necessary qualifications will not be able to fix it.

As the described repair, 3 options were listed:

1) Unsoldering the old chip and soldering the new one:
-the new chip can only be obtained from a dead laptop, it cannot be obtained from the factory by order, you can only buy a motherboard with it in assembly, but this is about 11,000 rubles. - i.e. half the cost of a laptop at the time. and given the fact that now he is a worker BUSHNY commercials will cost 5000, then of course there is no reason at all to repair it.

2) Unsoldering the old chip and soldering back (reballing):
- this allows, if the chip is working (as a rule, this is so), re-solder as expected all the pins (legs) of the chip; in general, the chip does not quite have legs. it is a silicon square, in which there are metal dots - conclusions, there is nothing to do with an ordinary soldering iron; a bunch of small balls of solder is specially rolled and placed in the recesses in the board, the chip is placed on top of it evenly and heated with an infrared hair dryer, the chip melts the balls of solder under it; this is usually done using a special template (if you did it yourself, you had to write it to order)

3) Heating the chip with an infrared hair dryer, so that the solder under it melts and restores the contact of the chip with the board - the method is estimated at 50% reliability, since there is no guarantee that the chip will be soldered and who will not move the horses if he was still alive.

It is of course clear to anyone that this is almost impossible at home.
Personally, I tried to hand it over to the service center for money (the warranty ended), but when I heard the price of 8,000 rubles. and changed his mind.
I went to an electronics repair store, they broke 10,000 rubles for me. And when asked to just warm up the chip (method 3), they broke 5000 rubles (and the chance that it will work is 50%), arguing that they have a paid disassembly and without diagnostics they will not do anything, which is also paid.

Of course, I realized that the laptop was not cost-effective to repair and forgot about it for half a year. Once, of course, I remembered and decided once all the same it was in the trash, then why not try to pick it up yourself.

The first time I took it apart, it took 2 days and a few sheets of paper on which I sketched where which wires go so that I could collect

I took out the board and found the chip, found it through a friend who agreed to warm it up for 500 rubles. chip (in a neighboring town), brought the board and showed where to heat it, put it together at home and it all worked 🙂

The laptop worked for about a month until friends called to play with them over the network. The laptop worked all night properly and played all games, the temperature according to the SpeedFan program was from 92 to 98 degrees when playing games on the laptop. When I arrived home, in the morning, the laptop again gave 6 screens on the monitor.

Of course, after the repair, it was no longer possible to overheat the laptop, but as usual I hoped for "maybe".

It was not possible to warm up again, since the one who had an infrared hair dryer had already closed his cell repair company and sold the soldering station.

Then I thought, maybe the chip is warmed up for 15 - 30 seconds at a temperature of 400 degrees without contact using a hairdryer attachment, which heats the chip and not everything around.

Of course, a new thought came to mind - to measure the temperature of a powerful soldering iron. I connected a 65 - wadded soldering iron through LATR to adjust the voltage, and hence the temperature. I measured the tip of the soldering iron with a thermocouple included in the multimeter kit (testers are blown everywhere, but I had one, I was fond of radio electronics in moderation). The temperature was just over 400 degrees.

Without hesitation, I flattened a piece of copper 8 mm tube and sculpted from it a nozzle for a soldering iron, which covered the tip like a clothespin, with rounded ends so that the contact area with the tip was higher and heat transfer, respectively.
On the working surface I carved a square for the size of the chip with a file and a file, smooth, so that the nozzle on the chip would lie flat.

I warmed it up carefully, at first without touching it to warm up the chip, then for a minute I kept it motionless on the chip. It is better not to move at this moment, there is a possibility of shifting the chipset. Fortunately, in my case, this is difficult to do, since it is on its small board and is flooded around the edges.

After assembly, the laptop worked again. I decided to do something about cooling. On the support sites, they wrote that nVidia released a program for subsequent manufacturers' notebooks that made the cooler work at full blast always.

I did not find such a program, but after trying others, I realized that the rotational speed of the cooler is not programmatically regulated, the programs do not affect the cooler (for example, on a stationary computer, all 4 coolers are regulated).

Without hesitation, I opened the laptop again and began to short-circuit the cooler outputs manually. There are 3 contacts, power supply and, apparently, a controller to adjust the speed. I don’t remember which pairs I was able to burn off the cooler adjustment when I turned around, but in general, go for it, it won’t break. Cooler began to always work on full food.

By the way, the cooler still did not save the case, it was not able to cool the laptop enough at the moment when the games were launched, the video chip all the same gained its temperature above 90 degrees and slowly died out.

If you fix your laptop, do not strain it more with the graphics of games, use the Internet, movies, but do not play, otherwise you will overheat again.

I photographed a selection, I was not too lazy to sort it out again

The keyboard is usually removed with a flat screwdriver, it is held on the latches along the edges and it is enough to pry them gently and forge the keyboard. There are several loops under the keyboard that should be disconnected and it is advisable to sketch how they were connected, write down the colors of the wires. There may also be mounting bolts that hold the motherboard in place.

The battery must be removed. On the back cover, unscrew all the screws you see and remove the covers.

Next, we take out the hard drive at the top left and the fan. The fan is supported by 3 screws, the rest is held by a metal plate, which is part of the fan and does not need to be removed. Do not forget to pull out the fan wires from the terminal block and at the same time all the other terminal blocks you see. Only very neat. I wrote about short-circuiting the fan terminals in pairs to turn it on at full power, in the previous photo you can see this terminal 🙂 You need to short it in the on state on the counter terminal that is on the board, just do not overexpose the laptop on, do not overheat, cooling is not effective without a cover.

After disconnecting all the terminals and unscrewing all the screws (do not forget to have it from the end, too), carefully remove the optical drive by simply pulling it out (on this laptop, there is only 1 screw in the lid). Remove the cover, it will cling to everything, but I think you can handle it, only if it cannot be removed in any way, then you have not noticed all the screws (all screws holding the board and the case are black, except for 2 silver ones on the battery side).

Where the blink in the photo is - this is the same video chip, it was under a silver metal radiator plate. When removing the plate, find rubber bands on it in places - they serve for thermal connection between the chips and the heatsink, for better contact. When you wake up to put the radiator back on, it is better to peel off the rubber bands and smear with thermal paste (sold in any electronics store).

Ideally, it is not necessary to tinker the soldering iron nozzle, you can clean the tip thoroughly, but it is still better to maximize the contact area and as evenly as possible, as well as this will allow you to keep the soldering iron perpendicular to the chip and reduce the risk of it coming off the chip and causing harm to surrounding elements.

I used KPT-8 thermal paste, I could only find it in a syringe, but if you have a choice, buy it in a metal tube. they say in syringes often comes across a fake, such a paste may not have sufficient thermal conductivity.

3) unscrew all the screws we see, they are black

4) disconnect all loops and wires

5) take out the optical drive, remove the lugs and take out the hard drive

6) turn off the fan, unscrew the 3 bolts and carefully remove it from under the copper radiator

7) take out the remaining cables and remove the cover

8) unscrew the radiator plate

9) we warm the chip in the most accurate way so that the soldering iron or soldering iron with a nozzle does not slip

If you make a nozzle, which is preferable, then make sure that it does not fly off the tip of the soldering iron. Personally, I got it U-shaped in the form of a bottle, the soldering iron is inserted from above with a sting, a copper strip from which the tip was bent, for the entire length of the sting from the wallpaper the sides are bent along an angle to grip the sting better. And the lower part is turned into a square - to the size of the chip itself. Do not make a larger chip, so as not to unsolder the roaring parts that are open around it. Personally, I took a 65 W soldering iron, in 30-40 minutes it warmed up to a stable temperature of 380-400 radios with a nozzle (for this, do not make the nozzle long, the smaller the better, so as not to cool the soldering iron in the air)

10) bring the hot soldering iron close to the chip and hold it almost touching it, let it warm up a little. Then touch the chip with a soldering iron and hold it for about 60 seconds, not forgetting to be careful not to let it slide to the side and damage something around.

11) Let the board sit for 5 minutes cool down and you can assemble in the reverse order

Lubricate the chip with thermal grease and reinstall the heatsink plate, then insert and screw the board into the upper part of the laptop, put on all the cables, put on the bottom cover carefully without damaging the remaining loops and screw everything up and connect as it was. Insert the cooler, hard drive, sit-room, battery, keyboard and turn on.

Experts say that warming up the chip gives a 50% chance that the chip will work after warming up (any chip, if it is working). Personally, my laptop came to life 3 times, and each time it died when I started games on it again and it overheated. And until those moments, the temperature was normally operated without games at the maximum speed of the cooler of about 70-80 degrees at the maximum resolution for it.

Note for those whose laptop works but overheats and turns off

If your laptop gets too hot and turns off after a while, you may have a clogged radiator.

A fan in a laptop blows not on a specific chip, but on a metal heatsink, which in turn touches (cools) the necessary chips. The part of the radiator where the fan is blowing is the outlet from the laptop, if you put your palm to it, you will feel a warm stream of air. So for many, after a year or more of operation, the radiator clogs up so much that it looks like a layer of dust like felt and does not blow warm air out of the laptop, which leads to overheating and disabling the processor temperature monitoring system, or turning off the video card and subsequently freezing and turning off the entire laptop ...

Remove the back cover and gently get rid of the dust.

Dust often accumulates in those who like to operate the laptop not on the table but on the stomach, sofa, bed. in general, where your electronic friend through the slots in the bottom sucks air from the material like a vacuum cleaner. In addition, not everything in a laptop is cooled by a radiator on which the cooler blows; on the chips there is often a corrugated radiator plate, which is blown by gravity, air, which is sucked in through the slots in the bottom, which lies on the sofa of the bed, etc.

If you are not using it on a table, then make sure that the "airways" of your laptop are free.