Re: A31p GPU issues

[schen]

I know that I'm at least partially covering old ground, but I thought I'd try to accumulated some ideas from the A31 community before I break down and buy another MB to resolve my A31p with a bad GPU. I'm getting the classic garbled screen output which point to a bad GPU.

I've heard of people who have reflowed the solder, but I'm not sure whether that was directly or baking it in an oven. I understand that when IBM/Lenovo refurbishes them, they don't actually use a soldering iron, but some sort of a pinpoint hot air gun and usually only need to do the corner solder points. I know that some folks have said that they've had some positive results by putting some sort of shim (eg. stickynote) on the GPU.

I'm just interested in seeing if there's some way to save the board and allocate my scarce resources somewhere else.... like a a big/fast HDD and more RAM!

[RWDPLZ]

If you want a board to test your theories on I have an A31p motherboard you can have for $20 shipped.

[schen]

You have PM.

[RWDPLZ]

PM'ed you back

[RWDPLZ]

I keep getting this debug error when I try to send you this PM, so I'll post it here:

I thought the idea was, to use this broken board to try and use the heat gun to remove the GPU, to see if it could be done, and if it can, to remove the known bad GPU from your board and replace it with this one, which might be good?

You could also try hooking this board up in your A31p to see if any video comes up at all when it's turned on, like the IBM logo. I never tried because it came to me like this, and I didn't want to waste the time tearing my good one down, putting this bad board in, taking out, and putting the good one back in.

The broken connector is the blue VGA port on the back next to the purple parrallel port, not the LCD panel connector.