Good day folks. My workmate and I had a debate today regarding the reflow of a HP Pavilion DV6. It displayed the common symptoms of GPU failure: blinking caps lock light and a blank screen. Having (successfully) done many reflows so far, with a success rate of around 80% (not accounting for how long the thing actually lasted, mind you), I took the thing apart and brought it down to its motherboard, which presented me with 3 chips (4 if you could the CPU itself): one I believe is the southbridge since it isn't covered by the heatsink at all, the northbridge and the GPU. I took pictures of the GPU and northbridge up close.
As I hopped to it and began peeling off the red fixing "gum" located in each corner of the smaller RADEON IGP chip, my buddy just walked in and told me "you're working on the wrong chip - the larger one is the GPU. That IGP is the northbridge". Although I've successfully reflown those IGPs before and IGP WOULD stand for Integrated Graphics Processor (I BELIEVE), I must admit his remark did put me off for a few minutes as I tried looking up those numbers on the dies trying to indeed work out the mystery once and for all. He backed up his argument by pointing out the two RAM chips near the larger chip which are commonly found on graphics cards in that configuration.
I didn't get too much info though, so I'm calling out to any laptop whizzes out there who can immediately straighten me out for sure. In the end I stuck with what I knew and did the IGP chip which brought the laptop back from the dead, but this wasn't a convincing enough result, since the heat could've very well transferred to the larger chip just enough to result in the laptop "waking up" again, which would mean my buddy is right, so which is it ? Cheers and thanks.
As I hopped to it and began peeling off the red fixing "gum" located in each corner of the smaller RADEON IGP chip, my buddy just walked in and told me "you're working on the wrong chip - the larger one is the GPU. That IGP is the northbridge". Although I've successfully reflown those IGPs before and IGP WOULD stand for Integrated Graphics Processor (I BELIEVE), I must admit his remark did put me off for a few minutes as I tried looking up those numbers on the dies trying to indeed work out the mystery once and for all. He backed up his argument by pointing out the two RAM chips near the larger chip which are commonly found on graphics cards in that configuration.
I didn't get too much info though, so I'm calling out to any laptop whizzes out there who can immediately straighten me out for sure. In the end I stuck with what I knew and did the IGP chip which brought the laptop back from the dead, but this wasn't a convincing enough result, since the heat could've very well transferred to the larger chip just enough to result in the laptop "waking up" again, which would mean my buddy is right, so which is it ? Cheers and thanks.
Comment