defective ati chipset?

[BigTroll]

I have a inspiron 1521 AMD dual core with Radeon Xpress 1270 graphics, I was browsing the web in chrome and all of a sudden chrome says a tab is unresponsive so i close it and keep browsing ebay about 10 seconds later it looks up and the screen goes grey and fans to high speed, now it wont even power up. goes on for a second then shuts off. I found their are alot of bad logic boards for sale on ebay and it makes me wonder if the ati chipset is defective. I tried all to revive it removed cmos battery, reseated processor tried different ram etc, nothing. i even removed the ram as I was told dells beep if you do so and nothing. I have since bought another parts machine off ebay that boots and hope this doesn't happen again.

[Uranium-235]

Re: defective ati chipset?

it might be a BGA issue. I've ran into one bad balled modern AMD chipset, and it wasn't overheated or anything (didn't produce much heat)

did a full reflow, customer has said it still works now over a year later

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: defective ati chipset?

Don't think it's a BGA issue. These old chipsets rarely failed. Some power supply went short. Or maybe even the CPU. I've had older AMD CPUs short out before.

If the chipset BGA had bad soldering it would have still powered on afterwards, giving distorted or no video.

[BigTroll]

Re: defective ati chipset?

Thanks for the advice guys. I got my parts unit 1521 today and put it back together, using a AMD Turion 64 x2 TL-60, the chipset temp gets higher then the cpu, gets up to about 69. I noticed on the logic board it has two amd chips I think one is the x1270 and the other the chipset, the chipset is a naked chip and has no heatsink where the other one shares with the cpu's heatpipe

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: defective ati chipset?

The other chipset is the southbridge and does not require a heatsink.