F
Felipe G. Nievinski
Heat sink already replaced.
Any ideas what else to try?
Thanks,
-FGN.
Any ideas what else to try?
Thanks,
-FGN.
B
BillW50
In
What is the make and model of this laptop? Does it have the video chip
on a card or the motherboard? What kind of CPU does it have?
Felipe said:
What is the make and model of this laptop? Does it have the video chip
on a card or the motherboard? What kind of CPU does it have?
P
Paul
Felipe said:
Did you use thermal paste when replacing the heatsink ?
*******
This document is to demonstrate someone applying paste to their
processor. Just to give you some idea how it works. It improves
thermal conductivity into the heatsink/heatpipe assembly.
Enthusiasts use paste, because they're always taking their
computer apart, and this stuff is relatively easy to clean
off and easy to re-apply.
http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/appmeth/int/ss/intel_app_method_surface_spread_v1.1.pdf
Some heatsink assemblies come with thermal tape, which is good for
one application. And tape has about 1/10th the performance of paste.
The advantage of tape, is it never needs maintenance, whereas the
same cannot be said for thermal paste. You may need to disassembly
and reapply paste after a several year period. (I.e. If three years
from now, it's shutting down again, you may need to clean and reapply
some paste.) I haven't changed the paste on mine since installing it
a couple years ago, and thermal performance is still good. With tape,
it wouldn't conduct nearly as well, but the tape can't "ooze out"
of the gap.
If your heatsink assembly did come with thermal tape on it, the tape
can have a protective layer on the outside, which you remove.
I really hate that concept, because on a few occasions, I peeled
off the wrong layer, and ruined the tape. So if your heatsink
assembly came with tape, make sure you're prepared the thing
properly before bolting it down. You may have left the
protective plastic on top of the tape. If you did it right, the
active surface would be sticky or gooey, rather than being "smooth"
like plastic. The plastic cover, is to prevent the material underneath
from picking up dust and dirt before usage.
http://www.torchworld.com.au/catalog/images/ThermalTransferTapeNM2790.jpg
Some heatsinks, like on desktop processors, come with screen printed
material. The heatsink is suspended in a plastic shell, so the gooey
material won't touch anything until you're ready to use it. So that's
how they avoid using a protective cover in that case, by suspending the
heatsink so it won't touch anything.
In this example of a desktop cooler, you can see a gray material that's
been printed or deposited, on the aluminum. It's ready to press down
onto the CPU, with no additional preparation steps.
http://www.build-your-own-computer.net/image-files/cpu-heatsink.jpg
Paul
F
Felipe G. Nievinski
Good point; yes, I did.
-FGN.
F
Felipe G. Nievinski
It's an HP DV69115NR, with an Athlon CPU and an Nvidia GeForce GPU.
I just learned this is an infamous case -- see <http://
www.nvidiasettlement.com/>.
I called HP Support and told them I interested in paying for an out-of-
warranty repair.
They said they won't do it; they're offering a $100 rebate to purchase
a new one.
This is a 4-year old laptop -- too young to die.
I'm going to see what I can do to repair it myself. I'm about to toss
it in the recycle bin.
-FGN.
B
BillW50
In
Yes that is exactly what my first guess was. Many people have gotten
them working again for two weeks to about 4 months by stripping it down
to the motherboard and baking it in an oven for 10 minutes at 400
degrees F. Although I don't think this is too much help really. As it is
only going to happen again anyway. ;-(
Felipe said:
Yes that is exactly what my first guess was. Many people have gotten
them working again for two weeks to about 4 months by stripping it down
to the motherboard and baking it in an oven for 10 minutes at 400
degrees F. Although I don't think this is too much help really. As it is
only going to happen again anyway. ;-(
T
the wharf rat
Relocate to Greenland?
R
Ryan P.
It is a decent stopgap, though. Its been 6 months since my last bake,
and my DV6000 is still going strong.
I've also gotten myself a 12-cell battery, so that lifts the back-end
up and increases circulation.
R
Ryan P.
You'll want to check the area where the copper is supposed to make
contact with the GPU. HP uses a thermal pad rather than thermal paste
because there is such a large gap.
If you replaced the heat sink and just used thermal paste over the GPU,
you most likely aren't getting any contact between the chip and the
sink. You'll have to either solder a piece of copper onto the heat
sink, or get a replacement thermal pad.
H
Happy Oyster
Watta young leapfrog! Just found that the HP 32E here, still in use, is
doing its job for 31 years now.
T
Tazz
I was given a HP dv2000 that didn't work right. Long story short - I
tore it down and pulled the heatsink off. Cleaned the thermal pad off of
the GPU, put the heatsink back on and eyeballed it. There's quite a gap
there. I didn't have the 'correct' shim material so I improvised. A
shiny dime and thermal paste fit nicely, a penny seemed like it put a
little too much pressure on the GPU when the heatsink was back in place.
The GPU temp don't jump around like it did before, more of a stable rise
when the GPU's being used and a steady fall when inactive. Sadly I think
the damage has already been done to the chip.
p.s. - IMO the heatpipe configuration on the heatsink didn't help
matters. It has the CPU in the middle of the length of the pipe with a
fan on one end of it and the GPU on the other end.
B
Bob_Villa
Gotta ask...are you a frank or a burger? You can't be both. (I prefer
burgers!)
B
Brian Cryer
BillW50 said:
Whilst baking it in the oven sounds just wrong, could you tell me where I
can found ot more? I'd given up on my daughters HP laptop (same symptoms)
and I'm curious if you have more information on this? If the GPU is at fault
it is possible to replace it?
Thanks.
P
Paul
Brian said:
The baking process, is to fix cracked solder joints.
On a real production line, you have a "temperature profile"
to apply during the soldering process.
http://enc.ic.polyu.edu.hk/Training_practical/Basic electronic practice/reflow.gif
Using a toaster oven for doing this kind of work, is lunacy.
You have no idea whether the balls got to the liquid phase or
not. Too much heat, and you begin to burn things. But that
has not stopped people from rescuing equipment that way.
They've done some video cards that way. But with a larger PCB,
the problem will be finding a large enough oven. Personally, I
wouldn't use the oven or heating device, for later preparing food.
There's bound to be a stink of burned plastic and potentially
solder residue left afterwards.
The right way to do this, is with a hot air rework station.
There are fittings for the head of the device, that can be
removed. You pick a fitting large enough to encompass the chip
to be repaired. That is then heated with hot air, while surrounding
components remain cool. There is also a source of heat you can
apply to the bottom of the PCB at the same time, so it heats from
both sides (less stress that way). The bottom heater is probably
a heat slug, as there's nothing to surround on the bottom. And
the machine can be programmed to ramp the temperature, do dwell time
and so on, so you can precisely match the profile recommended by the
manufacturer of the chip being repaired.
http://product-image.tradeindia.com/00401612/b/1/Manual-Hot-Air-BGA-Rework-Station-G500.jpg
That machine also has a vacuum wand, for lifting chips off the board
while they're still molten. But for this kind of repair (reheat cycle),
you wouldn't be using the wand, or pulling the chip.
If you were doing this at a factory, the next step would be a visit
to the XRay machine, to check how well the soldering process went.
You can "see" cracked balls, with a 2.5D XRay machine, viewed from
either side of vertical.
http://www.lightspeedmfg.com/images/BGA_Repaire_Rework/BGA-X-Ray-1.gif
Normally, BGA soldering has relatively low defectivity, and you
don't necessarily have to XRay everything. If you were churning out
a lot of stuff, you might do statistical inspection, rather than
do 100% inspection. BGA joints are bad about 1 in 100000 joints.
(But that's a figure from years ago, and I have no recent data.)
So you could do, say, 50 motherboards and have one bad solder joint
underneath a big chip. There are ways to do structural test of the
PCB, to detect an open solder joint, if one was present. And doing
that test, would be preferably to tying up an Xray machine (because
you'd want to do that test anyway).
To control stress, some chips receive an "underfill", like a resin
that they apply underneath the chip. I don't really understand how
this helps. It's supposed to take some of the stress off the
solder balls, but I couldn't wrap my head around it. Since the
clearance under the chip is so small, I also couldn't understand
how you could get a uniform treatment under there. And, what happens
when you need to do rework, like remove the chip ? I don't think
we used this technique at work. At least, on nothing my department
made.
http://www.somar.co.jp/english/products/img/somatect03.gif
Paul
B
Brian Cryer
Paul said:
<snip - good material but not relevant to my reply>
Nice to get an understanding of what its is, thank you Paul.
I don't think I'm yet a lunatic so it's not something I will try - even if
others claim success!
Thanks.
R
Ryan P.
The warning is very valid. It wouldn't be a shock to destroy a board
by doing this. I certainly wouldn't recommend doing this on a
motherboard you can't afford to gamble with.
That being said, I have done this to my HP dv6302 with no ill effect.
Three times, as a matter of fact. The first two times I didn't make the
oven hot enough because I was scared of melting something. At the lower
temperatures, the "fix" lasted about 2-3 months. When I finally went to
a higher temperature, the fix has been solid for 6-8 months so far.
The concept is pretty simple... You heat the motherboard to point at
which the solder softens and naturally eliminates any cracks that have
formed. When you turn off the heat, as the solder cools, it contracts
slightly and regains solid contact with the GPU.
Just to show you that its not complicated, here are the steps. Again,
there are no guarantees it WON'T melt something you don't want melted,
but I have done it with no issues on my OWN machine.
You will need an oven, some aluminum foil and a baking sheet or pan.
1) Disassemble the laptop so you have the bare motherboard.
2) Remove all cables, wires, batteries, RAM and the sticky plastic
coverings. Strip it down until you can't remove anything anymore.
3) Preheat your oven to 395 degrees (I would never use a toaster
oven... Use a regular household oven, for reasons I'll explain later)
4) Make four balls with the aluminum foil. Place the motherboard (top
side up) on the baking sheet, using the balled aluminum foil to raise it
off the bottom and to keep it as level as possible
5) Place the motherboard in the oven, leave it be for 8 minutes.
6) Turn the oven off, and crack open the door. Let the oven cool down
to room temperature *slowly*. This will allow the solder to contract
and reharden with less chance of cracks forming. I typically let it sit
overnight.
7) Reassemble the laptop, and hopefully enjoy a newly working laptop
8) Run your oven through a cleaning cycle.
This is the website I used initially. The only thing I changed is I
went to 395 degrees instead of 385.
http://www.computerrepairtips.net/how-to-reflow-a-laptop-motherboard/
Again, this isn't a guaranteed fix, but if you are either going to try
this or buy a new laptop anyway, go ahead and try this.
B
Brian Cryer
Ryan P. said:
<snip>
Thank you Ryan. Whilst I'm not sure whether I'm brave enough to try this
yet, I do appreciate the step-by-step explanation. I've not yet decided what
I should do with my HP, if I end up binning or replacing the motherboard
then it would do no harm to try ... All the warnings are duly noted.
R
Ryan P.
The worst part is disassembling the stupid thing, and then getting it
back together.
I hate working on laptops.
