Thinkpads Forum

I know a lot of early T61 had video card problems. I see a lot of T61 on Ebay that state "boots to bios no further testing done" . My question is will a bad video card allow bios to be seen clearly? Can a picture of bios in auction still have problems when booted into Windows?

Almost all T61 models with nIVDIA graphics have the defective chip, but the defect shows up in different ways, or not at all. Some (a lot?) of those sold on ebay, have had the defective chip heated, which allows them to appear to work normally for a few minutes, hours, or days, but they are still defective.

neil thank you for the reply. But will the bios show up with a defective chip ?
On another noe do you know where I can get a LCD fues diagram for a T61. I blew a fuse on one of my T61s. Changed an inverter with the power on.

If the chip works just a little, the BIOS will still appear, but that's no indication that the motherboard is OK.
If you want to buy one, make sure to get it here on the forum, from a trusted seller!
And schematics are IBM/Lenovo proprietary material, not publicly available.
Look for F1, F2, F3 etc on the motherboard, they are fuses. Test them with a multimeter.

Many of the nVidia boards/systems dumped on ebay have had failed GPU chips. I have a couple dozen here that will boot to bios with no problem, but won't make it to a windows desktop without lots of problems and the ones that won't boot to bios can easily be rigged up so they will (I won't post how to do it for obvious reasons, but others here have).

The only way I source the boards is to test complete corporate laptops for 7 days including several hours of gpu stress tests all while temps are monitored. The ones that pass I use to source system boards, the rest go back into the grind and will eventually end up on ebay or other similar websites.

Selling a good working nVidia board on ebay would be like trying to sell a genuine Rolex watch on the streets of Tawain, with every street vendor claiming to have genuine Rolex for $100, and here you are trying to sell a $10,000 watch in their midst.