High_Voltage

Hm, I don't see any difference to my own schematic I made following Gerald's designs. Can you measure PSU_ON voltage with the laptop on and off? Does it always stay 3.3V, or could it be that it drops, but not completely to zero? In order to set aside any suspicion on BIOS settings, you could try with original BIOS and an AMD card, for example. Or with Nvidia, and just wait until the laptop powers itself off-

Try disabling wake-on-LAN if it is enabled. Also, if you share your final schematic, I could have a look.

This is a good point as well. Originally, the CPU and GPU heatpipes run isolated and only meet at the radiator of the heatsink. If you are running an eGPU setup, your dGPU is idling, therefore you can harness heat transfer capacity of the second heatpipe to reduce CPU temperatures. I've definitely seen it done somewhere (maybe even on this forum). The guy has smudged thermal paste between the two heatpipes, allowing the second one to participate in heat extraction from the CPU, and reported a very significant decrease in CPU temps. I would imagine that this idea can be improved on by using better thermal compounds, such as thermally-conductive epoxy (very reliable but brittle and not very high thermal conductivity) or thermally-conductive silicone glue (the white rubbery stuff you find inside electronics). The ultimate solution would be to try soldering them together with some low melting point solder, like indium (157°C) or Rose's alloy (94°C).

On my Y510p whenever I ran something like Prime95, the CPU would immediately heat up to 90 degrees C (very briefly, but you could see a maximum value captured in e.g. HWMonitor), and then cut the turbo completely, settling at 2.4GHz. Don't remember GPU load affecting the CPU in any way as long as temperatures were normal. Right after I noticed this and read that it's impossible to control fans directly in any way on this machine (other than repeatedly calling the dust cleaning option, which some people have actually written scripts for) I had this idea to build a custom fan controller. I imagined it as a small package microcontroller (e.g. Atmel ATtiny85v), which would be installed between the fan and the motherboard by cutting the PWM wire. The chip would read motherboard-supplied PWM duty cycle and map it using a lookup table into a custom fan profile, generating appropriate PWM for the fan. Never actually gotten to implementing this, though. As for thermal interfaces, I tried Arctic MX-4, but it doesn't seem to help much. There appears to be a design flaw with coldpads not being pushed to the chips with enough force, especially on the ultrabay GPU. I can very well see how liquid metal with its vastly superior thermal conductivity would make a big difference. Also, I've read about people getting good temperatures by installing thin copper shims from Aliexpress between the heatsink and the chips. Speaking of 60fps cap, could it be just VSync?

@Bronius First of all, find where to buy an ultrabay connector, and buy one. Then, order a PCB from China (not very expensive). Get all the rest from Ebay or Aliexpress and solder everything together! @rusTORK You've actually made a really good point here about 1600/2000-series cards. Has anyone tested any of them?

And speaking of the adapters, I would say that getting them made sounds quite realistic to me. The conditions are favourable. We just need someone willing to invest their time and money to get this done. Speaking of PCB design, I'm pretty sure @gerald, @Swung Huang or @Zakyn will be more than happy to share, should we get this going. Let's say there's 50 people willing to buy an adapter for $100. One can get 50pcs 4-layer 10x15cm impedance-rated PCBs from JLCPCB for just above $100 + shipping + import tax. Let shipping + tax be like $50. The connector is currently $6.14/piece with free international shipping here (correct me if this is a wrong connector). Other components (PCIe slot, PSU connector, SMDs), let's say another $10 per adapter. We're getting about $1000 in expenses + manual labor with a perspective of earning $5000. Good question now is how many people would actually be ready to buy one right now, considering the Y510p is already a really old machine?

@Drozof You can only use M.2 for PCIe if the socket supports NVMe. This laptop supports M.2 SATA only, therefore your only option other than using the adapter would be plugging a PCIe x1 cable instead of the wireless card.

Also a reminder: this should be done without battery installed. Also, try the clean formatted FAT32 drive with JUST the Yx01 file on it. If that doesn't help, then this is probably a hardware problem.

@AllanDavidson Did you follow the instructions thoroughly? I mean using the correct USB port, correct power plug-in procedure etc? Regardless, flash LED not blinking a single time is a very bad sign. Could be that your PCH has died. Not sure if there's an easy way to test this at home, but any decent laptop repair shop would have no problem diagnosing something like that. Also, you should verify that you RAM works in some other PC (or put some known-good in this one).

@AllanDavidson The crisis recovery disk has nothing to do with booting from flash drive. It is a very low level recovery mechanism built into (possibly) the Intel ME firmware, which allows PC to read raw binary BIOS file (which is what the file I linked essentially is) and rewrite its own BIOS completely even in case it has been totally corrupted. During the Crisis recovery you WILL NOT SEE anything on the screen. Your only indication that the process is happening will be the blinking of the access LED on your flash drive, meaning the file is being read. Additionally, the PC is supposed to beep occasionally during the process, but mine didn't during my tests.

@AllanDavidson Have you tried performing Crisis Recovery? If not, I would strongly recommend you do. You can find instructions here, under the "If things don't go right" spoiler. For that you will need any FAT32 flash drive, with this file written to it. Any flash drive will do, although I recommend using one that has an LED for activity indication. It will let you know whether the PC is reading the file and thus whether the reflash process has been initiated. Also, the keyboard backlight behaviour doesn't seem like a typical BIOS problem. Are you able to adjust keyboard backlight brightness by pressing Fn+Space? No effect when pressing power button is strange, too. Does it behave like that even if you remove the OS HDD? Can you try that if you haven't already?

Oh, I was talking about the connector that the gpu is inserted into, not the ultrabay one.

The schematic looks good. I can't see any mistakes. Have a look at your PCB and make sure everything is routed correctly. One pitfall I could think of is the footprint for eGPU PCI-E connector. When you look at it from the top, with that smaller section facing up, the B will be on your left, and the A - on your right, which is counter-intuitive when compared to the schematic symbol. Another question is whether you've actually tested that GPU with another computer to verify that it works?

Do you have a schematic of what you've built? Double-check the pinout of pcie and whether all the signals are routed correctly. Check whether your Reset signal is ok. Also, did you use a high speed PCB and if you did, did you calculate RF impedance of the differential pairs correctly? I think it needs 100 Ohms per pair. Anyway, if the issue was in signal integrity, I would at least expect the card to be detected, so the problem is somewhere else... Also, are both 12v and 3v correctly supplied to the card's pcie slot?

Here's a schematic symbol and a footprint for KiCAD I've designed for my version of the adapter: https://mega.nz/#!DIxnzA6B!cvIvt-ZVpfJ3FMkgPbybyGcQviCzwBhV4VY2x-eXk5A Speaking of my ultrabay project, it's kind of stalled right now as my Y510p has been malfunctioning in a very strange way for a month or so, and I started to consider a PC build. Nevertheless, I'll still finish it at some point. P.S. I haven't yet ordered any PCBs with this footprint, so it is unknown whether it has got any mistakes.

Sure. Simply follow my normal installation guide, but replace step 3 with an MS-DOS flash preparation method described here. This method uses an old utility called HP Disk Storage Format Tool, which has been noticed not to work correctly under Windows 10. You will have to find a Windows 7 computer (earlier windows might work too!) to run it.

This is really interesting! The Y500 mod has not received much testing at all and is only used by a couple of people at the moment. I think this is because of the adapter being initially advertised as not compatible with the y500 series. Regardless, the whitelist removal component of this mod is an exact copy of the svl7's original work for the y500, therefore it'd be a good idea to check his thread for similar issues.

First of all, you could try: 1) Reseating all the connectors (especially, the ultrabay) - this has been the main cause of this sort of problems 2) Verifying that your power supply is good (try another one) 3) Cold-booting windows (don't really remember how to do this) 4) Booting in safe mode (somehow) to see if it works 5) Does the system boot without eGPU? If not, maybe, this is related to BIOS settings? (UEFI/Legacy; AHCI/IDE; SecuceBoot, and all that stuff)

We have seen this several times before. A few people here have faced this error and despite this, their PCs continued to work fine without updating the EC firmware. This means you're probably safe to proceed without having to do anything else. If you still wish to have your EC updated, there could be a way. If I recall correctly, someone has managed to get it to flash under MS-DOS (rather than FreeDOS). You'll have to prepare an MS-DOS flash drive following the original Svl7's instructions, but keep in mind that the application required to do this doesn't work under Windows 10.

@Zakyn I'm not sure. Guessing that @gerald has experimentally determined that out of the two possible reset pins this one is the right one. Actually, I'm also currently designing an Ultrabay adapter. In my design I decided to go for @gerald's choice of Reset pin, but pull it up to the standby +3V (pin 64 on Lenovo schematic). There is already a pull-up on the motherboard for this pin, I've added this one just in case. Probably going to try with this pull-up unpopulated first...

Speaking of RAM, there should be a pair of pads under the black sticker behind RAM sticks. Shorting these together with tweezers will reset CMOS too. Of course it will be no help if you managed to initiate emergency reflash and interrupted it mid-way, damaging the BIOS flash contents.

I would strongly recommend trying different flash drive. Preferably with USB2.0, activity LED and small size like 4GB or so.

Do you have access to another computer? Can you make sure the Yx01.bin file is in the root of the flash drive and the flash drive is formatted in FAT32? If these conditions are satisfied and you've performed the procedure described in the original post correctly, the computer should be able to pick the file up and reflash itself. Pay attention that you need to plug the drive into specific USB port. You generally need to hold the buttons for about a minute and then let it sit for about 10 minutes or so to do its thing. If your flash drive has an LED, you'll immediately see whether the computer is reading files or whether it has failed. Anyway, I'd try the @Klem's advice first. This is a more sensible thing to try in this situation.

@jxfong2 You'll need to power the laptop with its own power brick and the eGPU with a separate desktop power supply. Also, keep in mind that RTX2070 has not been tested with this adapter, so there's a chance it won't work. @manolis Unfortunately, you can't use a regular SATA 2.5'' drive caddy for connecting to Ultrabay socket. The Ultrabay system doesn't use SATA connector inside the bay, but rather a separate high-speed PCI-e x8 socket located next to it. It is buying the plug part for this socket (cheap and in low quantities) that is a problem right now.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think these connectors are for the wrong side (this would be the same as the one on the motherboard, not the one on the ultrabay device).