Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2015 15:30:30 -0700, "David Farber"
wrote:

For $80 I can send the motherboard in to have the GPU reflowed and
have a modified heat sink installed to keep it from overheating
again. It comes with a 60 day warranty. The gentleman that fixes it
says he's had a very high success rate and if he can't fix it,
there's no charge and free return shipping. I'm curious enough to
see if that will fix it for good. If this all works out, I'll let
you know.

I also send out the boards for repair. I have the same hot air SMT
desolding station, but have had lousy luck with reflowing the video
chips. Of the various HP and Dell laptops with the alleged Nvidia
problem, I've only successfully (long term) repaired 2 out of 7
attempts. The big problem is that I can't easily operate the
motherboard outside of the case to see if I've succeeded. If I wanted
to continue doing these repairs, I would need to build a fixture.

There are three types of repairs for this problem. The cheap and easy
fix is to reflow the BGA video chip and hope that it hold. It usually
will if you don't bend the motherboard when you reinstall it. That's
probably why both yours and my reflow jobs were failing after a few
days. The not so cheap solution is to remove the chip, clean up the
pads, and reflow solder a new chip in it's place. That's much more
work, more expensive, but far more reliable. There are also those
that will remove the chip, clean off both the chip and the PCB, and
reball the motherboard. I've only had one of those done, and it
worked just fine, proving that there's probably nothing wrong with the
Nvidia video chips. It's possible that the vendors that replace the
chips are using recycled chips in this manner.

Some people have made a business out of replacing the chips, so prices
have fallen.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/230491379295

Ask your vendor if they replace and/or reball the video chip. If so,
they're probably ok. If they only reflow the existing chip with a
heat gun or oven, you may have problems.

Incidentally, I had no luck when I tried to reflow the motherboard in
a toast oven. I only did one and it was totally dead when I was done.
Oops. However, these JetDirect cards worked 100%. However, LJ2300
controller cards had only one success out of three:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/repair/BGA%20reflow/

Hi Jeff,

I just sent an e-mail to the eBay vendor you linked and directly quoted your
question about whether or not they do just a reflow or replace and/or reball
the chip.

It turns out the guy that I was going to send my board to for an $80 repair
needs the entire laptop so I nixed that idea.

Thanks for your reply.
--
David Farber
Los Osos, CA