Acer 5920G Laptop doing my nut in!! HALP

[Squid0x]

Hello helpful Hexus homies.

Bought an Acer Aspire 5920G off t'ebay for reasonable money to do up. Formatted the HDD and installed windows, then noticed that the cooling system had been pratted about with by some unqualified monkey (the skating/punk band stickers all over the thing and the large quantity of Dairy Lee wrappers in the carry bag that came with it lead me to believe that the seller may be a recreational marijuana smoker ).

I did the best I could with a bad situation, had the (labyrinthine and entirely underpowered) cooling system out, removed all the manky old thermal rubbish and arctic ceramiqued the lot and reseated everything (and replaced the 2 missing screws that should have been holding in the GPU! Can't have been doing any good either).

After quite some buggering about, I ran 3dmark and prime95 without HWMonitor temps getting into crazy territory but I may have got a bit carried away with myself. Stress tested it by running 3dmark06 on loop, and something clearly went pop.

Now the thing boots up, and makes it to windows as evidenced by the windows noise, but there's no picture whatsoever, other than a few lovely artefacts. External monitor makes no odds, nor does removing the MXM card, (if the thing has onboard graphics, it won't access them currently) so I suspect that the GPU memory has overheated (as the core shuts down at 1xx degrees) due to poor contact with the stupid cooler.

Specs of the thing are T7300 & 8600M GS on an MXM2 card.

The big money question is: Is the GPU likely to be repairable (I've done similar to desktop cards in the past by pushing the Mem OC too far and rescued them by booting off an old PCI gfx card and uninstalling/reinstalling/flashing the VGA BIOS on the defective GPU), but I can't do that on the lappy as, if the thing has onboard graphics, it won't access them currently...

Any ideas chaps? I've no other MXM2 cards and they're prohibitively expensive, and I think the main BIOS has to specifically support them anyway (I think that narrows it down to HD3470 & 8600M GS/GT [the thing is not up to cooling the latter 2 properly anyway, imo]).

I had considered blind-flashing the mobo BIOS off a boot disc, to one off a 5920Z (the onboard graphics equivalent sans MXM slot) but the thought terrifies me somewhat!

All help greatly appreciated, and cheers for reading if you got this far!!

Michael

[Jasp]

Don't even have to read the whole post, the 8600m was built on the G84/86 core if memory serves, ever last one of these chips have a bad soldering fault and basically broke, I'm afraid you have killed the GPU.

Alot of people mange to bring them back from the dead by baking them in a oven to reflow the solder, though this is only a temporary fix.

Even if it was a memory chip that's popped, the GPU will have ultimately broke at some point anyway.

Oven Baking : http://forum.notebookreview.com/hard...un-profit.html

Obviously just put the GPU in the oven not the full motherboard lol.

Edit: Also its quite possible the heatsinks originally had thermal pads on rather then paste, this would bridge the gap far better and is quite common in laptops.

[mrt9888]

Yeah it seems as though the graphics card is most likely to have gone, it is possible to put in another card put you will have to research which ones will also fit the heatsink, Acer MXM cards are easier to find.

But I personally would not bother repairing it further as you don't know what other parts could have gone and the cooling is not that good.

[Kumagoro]

If you have a heat gun you could have a go at reflowing with that. You need to get it pretty hot
so you might want to practice on a few other electronic boards to see how close and how long
before the solder melts so much bits drop off.

I have found on certain makes of laptop the heatsinks they use to cover the gpus to be of poor
design. HP especially uses some felt like pad in between the heat sink and die and without it
there is a clear gap of about 0.8mm. If it does come back you could try lapping a penny or see
what you can find at B&Q in the washer area.

[Squid0x]

Aye you might well be right on the thermal pad front, I probably shot myself in the foot there. I'm aware of the soldering issue with the 8000/9000 series. It's obviously been overheating and shutting down at the thermal limit before I re-seated everything, GPU never got over 85C so the mem seems more likely to me, personally, but either way it's probably dead. A mate of a mate fixes them in a slightly more pro manner than gas mark 3ing the buggers, but family issues there so can't get it fixed any time soon. I can't afford to bin it though so some sort of cheap repair is required, or I could give up and re-ebay the components/entire laptop with an honest description of the fault.

Bloody laptops these days! I'm typing this on a 6 year old pentium M/radeon 9700 laptop that was the dog's danglers at the time, and nowt of owt has ever gone wrong with it. Modern components are just **** I reckon.

Ta for the advise so far, wasn't expecting so much so quick

[Pob255]

As Jasp said there was a major flaw with the 8600m series of gpu's you've probably killed it.

I would of also suggested soaking the heatpipe and fin array cooler in warm soapy water, it could easily be coated in smoke residue, however at this point it's fairly pointless.

At this point you can try heating it to reflow the solder and hope that works otherwise hit fleabay again and try to get a new card, at least this is a laptop where you can replace the card, unlike most laptops where it's part of the motherboard.

[duc]

If it is a video fault, you could try the tealight reflow trick, as it is on a MXM card it would be easier to handle. In the past this method has fixed nvidia video on a Dell D620.