No sound through speakers

[VFR_firefly]

Sound works just fine with earphones though.

I've checked the audio-out connector and it doesn't seem to be getting stuck so it thinks that the earphone connector is still in there. I've also tried plugging in a known good speaker assy. and it still doesn't work. The connector on the board seems fine to my eye even under 30x magnification.

I'm concerned that this might be a board-level issue as I'm having some other problems:

• The original Mini-PCI WiFi card was giving me a ton of weird issues. I replaced with another which works better but randomly loses connection every few minutes and needs to reconnect
• TVSU doesn't seem to want to update the neat new drivers for onscreen sound volume indication and screen brightness.
• The screen looks really weird when playing certain games (Like Diablo-2) where there is a smaller video with a black frame around it instead of going full-screen which makes me think there might be a GPU issue.

Could this be the onset of the GPU issue? I've seen that many times on many thinkpads but never quite like this. Seems weird. SHould I just send the Mobo off to Superior Reball and be done with it or is there something else I could be missing? I've built a dozen of these things and this one just seems sick in a way that I can't put my finger on.

[Raceboy]

Problems with sound and miniPCI indicate a loose Southbridge chip to me.

As for potential GPU issue, do you have anything else weird going on with this board like hanging, screen distortion in Windows etc? If not, it is most likely not a GPU issue.

[VFR_firefly]

I've never had the southbridge chip issue with a Thinkpad so I really don't know much about it. Does it require reballing like a GPU or is it another process?

The only weird GPU issue is the strange letter-boxing reduced area when in some game modes (3D graphics maybe?) like Diablo-2. I've run D2 on a ton of other T4x's and R51's. In fact I'm running an identical T40 for my wife with the same games and set-up that I built/loaded at the same time as well as another for my sister's kids and neither of them had any of the problems I'm having with this one. Sure it's a 4 hour ordeal to get all the updates through MS and TVSU with multiple swipes and restarts until they stop finding more updates to install, but the only issue I usually ever get is my copy of WinXP-pro never seems to be able to get the right drivers from the install CD to run the onboard network card. That's not a big deal and once I use the one from the Lenovo site the rest of the process is simple once I can get a machine on the network.

This particular problem child had a bunch of loading issues and things that TVSU usually finds and installs automagically had to be manually shoveled in. Perhaps this Southbridge issue was causing TVSU not to see certain things?

I need to do some research on the fix for a loose Southbridge chip. I thank everyone for their help and giving me some more leads to follow. I was pretty much at the end of my skilz here. I kind of like that. This is how we grow and learn new things -stretching the envelope.

[RealBlackStuff]

A good starting point would be the websites in my signature.

But to keep things short, reballing the Southbridge is the most likely solution to your problem(s).
Remove the keyboard, palmrest and wifi card.
Then reconnect the keyboard and start up your laptop, while putting some pressure on the big Intel chip that you found under your wifi card.
If things run better now, you deffo have an SB problem.

[VFR_firefly]

The more I read about this issue the more I am convinced that it is the Southbridge. I thought when I first got this laptop that it had the GPU issue but the first time I started it at the guy's house I pressed on the keyboard bezel and it started and ran with no issues (in Linux as this was an OS-less Thinkpad from day one). he was amazed that it ran it all as he claimed it had issues with wifi and wasn't starting for him at all. I ran all the tests and it continued to run without any GPU issues. I even picked it up and moved it around and I never once had a single GPU-related issue.

Once I replaced the Wifi card It seemed to be the issue of a bad Wifi card and I attributed the weird issues I had loading things to it causing problems somehow. I was worried/theorized that it had caused some other issue with the board on the bios level or something that had messed something up in the settings. This was so different than the GPU issue that I was convinced that this wasn't a GPU/reball issue. Now I know that it must be a Southbridge issue and is the first Thinkpad I've come across with this problem.

Similar issue, different chip and different symptoms. I also remember now that the USB port would give me an issue with saying "This device could run faster" dialog when I was loading some of the drivers from a USB thumb drive. I thought it was a driver issue and it seemed to have gone away as I reloaded a few of the drivers manually. Now I suspect this was the southbridge chip giving me intermittent problems.

I guess this mobo is going to have to come out and be sent to Superior Reball like I've done to a dozen or so others for GPU reballing. They've never failed me except for the two Mobo's that i tried to reflow myself unsuccessfully and destroyed the GPU in the process...

Now I just send a bad GPU motherboard to them. It seems that now I'll have one other bad solder-ball problem they can fix for me.

I have an A30 that will not recognize a hard drive no matter what I do. I wonder if this could be a southbridge chip issue as well? This A30 mobo looks a lot like a T4x/R5x mobo to me. I'll have to see if it has a southbridge chip in it and try pressing on it. I rarely see A30's and figured I could experiment with one since the surplus place had one for $20 and no T4x's/R5x's for a LONG time and I was looking for something to work on. I've always got friends/relatives begging for cheap laptops so I'm usually on the lookout for thinkpads to resurrect. And if nothing else, spare parts!

I've bought busted up T4x's/R5x's with smashed screens for $10 only to find 1GB memory inside! They don't like you taking them apart at this place I go to and got yelled at and threatened with expulsion/banning for simply taking off the memory cover on the back to peek inside -pulling a keyboard is totally out of the question so buying a $10-20 "parts" laptop (depending on what it looks like -10 for busted screen or cracked case, $20 for one that looks good and with no obvious issue -probably GPU) s like gambling that there might be good memory or other parts inside like a/b/g wifi cards and bluetooth modems. Maybe it is totally rebuildable with only a GPU problem which is an easy fix.

Usually these machines are pretty darn near stock except for added memory so as I dig through them I just punch in the model number on the Lenovo Site via my iPhone and see what should be inside when making decisions. Sometimes when there is a BIG pile of laptops to choose from so it's harder to decide which 3 to buy (they have a 3 laptop at a time buying limit!) but lately they have had nothing at all but junk (piles and piles of docking stations for $1 each! and usb 3.5 floppy drives for $2 -other non-thinkpad junk that I'm not interested in at all) I'm thinking they are totally getting out of the T4x/R5x series Thinkpads and there won't be many more coming through this place. It couldn't last forever

[poshgeordie]

As a company which reflows / reballs Thinkpads in UK, we come across TP's with no sound and it's usually an unsoldered Southbridge (SB) chip.

Having said that we've got one in which appears to be another as yet unidentified problem so it could be an audio related chip.

It does no harm to have the SB reballed since it's becoming an increasingly common problem for this range of TP's.

Typical symptoms for SB solder failures are:

USB ports run at slower 1.1 rather than 2.0.
Hard Disk doesn't work.
Keyboard doesn't work. Typically F1 doesn't work to access BIOS
Having pressed F1 for BIOS, laptop doesn't ever enter BIOS screens.
No sound.
No ethernet (not too common).

Any other problem - Just kidding!!