divinitous

laptop gone. Sorry, i do not see any option to delete a post.

Yes, this is unfortunately where i am at. I tried a reflow but it failed. The laptop won't boot now and a replacement motherboard is now my only way out. Disheartening considering i have the GN35 sli graphics card and a msata drive that i cannot re-purpose. I'm having a hard time putting the $150 into the computer when it's ultimately not able to keep up with todays games. May endup scrapping it out on Ebay.

Alright folks, looking for some opinions here. This laptop was great back in 2012 when I traveled for work and enjoyed my WoW/Counterstrike sessions at the hotel. I've since changed jobs and it got shelved for quite some time. Eventually I got back into WoW with a coworker and the laptop was dusted off and brought out for some remote gaming at a friends house. It did the job, but was nothing compared to my desktop at this point and the financial adviser (wife) was against me spending the money on something better. So i went the route of the SSD, more ram, and found a SLI card on ebay for cheap. Yes, dear, it'll only be $100 Oooo, it was nice, But still, not what I wanted it. So i went the route of overclocking... slightly. Alright, now we're cooking, literally. This isn't great but still on par with my friends aging desktop. I mean cooking! That laptop got HOT during some of the longer sessions. I always kept it on a flat surface but never really thought to use a cooling pad or raising up the bottom of the laptop. Yes, I did keep the fan clean and blow it out once a month or so. Trying to alleviate the issue I replaced the heat sink pads that were kinda falling apart with new. This helped some but really didn't do much. The fan exhaust was blasting super heated air. After some time I noticed that the video would get a little flaky with artifacts so i turned the overclocking down. Problem is it still got pretty damn hot. After about a month of 1-2 5 hour sessions a week I'm at the point where the laptop display will stay black unless the laptop sits for ~30 minutes on. At which point I can restart the computer and i'll get the Lenovo screen and it'll boot as normal. Problem is after a while the display locks up and craps out. I've tried reinstalling windows, removing the second video card, installing new drivers, installing slightly older drivers, removing the SSD, installing the old ram and just about anything else. My suspicion is the video chip got too hot and the BGA solder balls are messed up. The laptop display "works" warm, but not cold and this this is why i suspect the BGA. A replacement motherboard isn't in the options due to expenses, but trying a DIY "reflow" is something that I'm willing to do. Any thoughts on this? Is this the route I should take? m I'm really not in a position to buy a new laptop or really put any money into it.

Awesome! Thank you very much for providing this. My laptop won't even get to the Lenovo screen. I suspect that I really messed up something good with my tinkering. Luckily I saved the original bios file when I installed the modified one. Fingers crossed that this is the issue and I didn't cook the video card instead with my SLI tinkering. This should be a sticky. Update: Well, didnt seem to fix my issue. Still no video with screen or external monitor. Doing this procedure the USB drive would flash a few times at startup and that's about it.

Sweet, updated my bios!

Keep looking through ebay. I managed to find one with a broken faceplate for $50 shipped. Works fine.

Gonna have to save this one. I feel that I'm going to enter unknown territory soon. Thanks.

There's a method to force the fan to full always....

I went with Msata and kept the 1tb HDD for the storage. Seems to be a nice compromise.

Hmm, I might figure out a way to get a magnetic reed switch wired in so there's nothing visible but placing a small magnet in a key spot will close the brown wire circuit. Away from the HDD of course. Got me thinking now. If only there was space to jam an arduino in there somewhere.

Cant wait for access to download the bios unlocker. I just got a the 650M SLI card to addon.