OT: Reflowing a Laptop Chip

[cmk]

My laptop has started to exhibit signs that the video chip soldering is failing from heat.  Intermittently I get a black screen on cold startup, though for now I can usually get it back to life once the unit warms up.  Seems to be pretty common on units with NVidia GPUs, and is well documented in HP laptops (which is what mine is, but has an ATI GPU).  HP largely seems to be covering their ears and yelling, "la la la la I can't hear you!", on this.  The best part is that I've read that they updated the BIOS to run the fan more in an attempt to solve the heat problem, which probably just made it last long enough to get outside the warranty period.

Does anyone here have any experience with this problem?  I've seen a few repair places online that will reflow the chip and modify the heatsink for about $125.  Is there anybody local that might do this?  That's cheap enough that I don't think that I want to mess with it myself.  Is the issue likely to come back in a few months? 

The laptop is about 1.5 years old (and 6 months out of warranty), and I have no intention to replace it right now, as I am otherwise very happy with it.

[Brian]

Not to be a buzz-kill... but you're probably hosed...

The notorious cold solder joint.  Same thing that red-rings every single xbox 360 eventually... Same thing that bricked to my Dell M1330.  Fortunately Dell was understanding enough to replace/upgrade the entire board (CPU/VID/everything is one big piece) and upgrade the heat tube, fan, and casing under a "tsb" for free.  My Xbox's... not so lucky... I'm on the third one.

The fan thermostat firmware update is pretty much just an ex post facto band-aid to try and reduce warranty claims.

I suspect that 're-flowing' the chip services... actually consist of sticking the board in an oven for an hour and hoping for the best.  I really can't imagine it's possible to properly apply heat to each individual contact to properly 'resolder' a modern computer processor.  Perhaps if the plastic frame was large enough to fit in a standard PCB board... but modern ones are so impossibly compact, the leads from the chip mounting plate just sit on top of the board instead of having pins that go through.

[cmk]

Yeah, I'm not entirely surprised to hear that.  I've seen some, let's say, interesting heating methods used to heat the chip. 

Assuming I'm hosed... is there any way to avoid this on future laptops, short of paying for an extended service contract to cover something that is a design problem in the first place?  Brands?

I know that there was a class action lawsuit over the NVidia chips on a number of laptops.  I haven't seen anything related to the ATI chips yet.

[neonmike22]

Fix it with fire!