The curse of the overheated graphic chips

[vince8]

The curse of the overheated graphic chips (or GPU Graphic Processing Unit) is similar to the plague of badcaps: a badly conceived and processed device found its way into a poorly designed system !

For the GPU curse, it is a perfect storm of

[1] a badly designed GPU (e.g. NVIDIA) chip with silicon hot spots, combined with the wrong bumping solder balls and defective packaging underfill. If the GPU chip overheats, the balls will crack and disconnect the GPU from the motherboard. Because in most laptop the GPU BIOS interrupt the boot BIOS during boot, the laptop will then not boot even though the laptop lights, CD and fan are working. In some cases, the laptop will nevertheless boot, but the display will be split, full of squares, or some component powered through the GPU e.g. WLAN will not work.

[2] very poorly thermal design of the laptop, causing GPU overheating and therefore ball cracking. For example, most of the laptop I gathered have a single heat-pipe from the GPU to the chipset to the CPU to the fan, instead of a dedicated heat-pipe for the GPU to the fan distinct from the heat-pipehooked to the CPU. Shame on you Dell & HP !

I just reviewed the stack of failed laptops; I hope that this list will help people that try to wonder why their laptops are not booting while all the lights/CD/fan are ON. The list is not exhaustive, but represents documented cases pf the overheated GPU curse.. All these failed laptops were quite expensive when first bought, and a significant loss for the small business. Some laptop families e.g. Dell XPS, Dell Latitude D630, HP DV2500/DV6000/V6000  have a 100% failure rate due to overheated Nvidia GPU.

When I have time, I will attempt to reflow all these GPUs, even though I know that the fix will only be temporary!

List of Laptops with GPU induced boot problems:

HP Pavilion DV6000 model DV6110US

AMD Turion X2 64 2x1.61GHz

Nvidia 7200 Go

Boots, WLAN (powered through the Nvidia chip) not working

HP Pavilion DV5000 model DV5120US

1.8AMD turion-64

ATI Radeon Express 200m

No Boot. All lights ON

HP Pavilion DV8000 model DV8315nr

1.8AMD turion-64

ATI Radeon Express 200m

No Boot. All lights ON

ACER Aspire 5552-3691

AMD Athlon Dual-core P340 2x2.2GHz

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250

No Boot. All lights ON

HP Pavilion DV4 model DV4-1222nr

AMD Turion X2 64 2x2.1GHz

ATI Radeon HD3200

No Boot. All lights ON

Dell Inspiron 9400 Model PP05XB

Intel Core 2 Duo 2x2GHz

Nvidia GeForce G0 7900 GS

Boots, screen full of small squares of characters

Dell latitude D630 Model PP18L

Intel Centrino Duo 2x2.2GHz T7500

Nvidia GPU Quadro MVS 135M

Boots, two screens split horizontally, then full of small squares of characters. O/S VGA OK.

Dell XPS M1530

Intel Core 3 Duo 2x2.4GHz T8300

NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

Dual heatpipes CS>GPU>fan and CPU>Fan

No Boot. All lights ON

Dell XPS M1330

Intel Core 3 Duo 2x2.4GHz T8300

Nvidia GeForce 8400MGS

Dual heatpipes CS>GPU>fan and CPU>Fan

No Boot. All lights ON

Dell XPS M1210

Intel Core 3 Duo 2x2GHz T2300

Nvidia GeForce

Single heatpipe CS>GPU>CPU>Fan

No more Boot. Lights ON and blinking

HP Pavilion DV2000 model DV718US

AMD Turion X2 64 2x2.1GHz

Nvidia GeForce GO6150

No Boot. All lights, CD drive, fan ON

HP Pavilion DV2500 model DV2416US

AMD Turion X2 64 2x1.8GHz TL-62

NVIDIA GeForce 7150M

No Boot. All lights, CD drive, fan ON

HP Compaq Presario CQ50 Model CQ50Z-100

AMD Turion X2 64 2x1.8GHz

NVIDIA GeForce 8200M G Graphics

No Boot. All lights ON

HP Compaq Presario V6500

AMD Turion 64 2.3GHz

Nvidia Nforce 630m

No Boot. All lights ON

HP Compaq Presario V6000

AMD Sempron 2.3GHz

NVidia GeForce Go 6150

No Boot. All lights ON

Toshiba M110

Intel Core Duo processor T2250 2x1.7GHz

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950

No Boot. All lights ON

HP Pavilion DV6807US

Intel Core2 Duo mobile T5850 2x2.16GHz

Nvidia GeForce GT 740M

No Boot. All lights ON

Toshiba A205-s5812

Intel Pentium Dual Core T2330 2x1.6GHz

Intel Media Accelerator X3100

No Boot. All lights ON

Toshiba Satellite P105-S9337

Intel Pentium Dual Core T27200 2x2GHz

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100

No Boot. All lights ON

Dell Inspiron 6400 E1505

Intel Core Duo T2300 2x1.66GHz

ATI Mobility Radeon X130

No Boot. All lights ON

Dell Precision M70 Model PP15L

Intel 2.26 GHz Pentium

NVIDIA Quadro FX Go1400

No Boot. All lights, CD, fan ON

Dell Latitude D610 Model PP11L

Intel Pentium M 760 2.00Ghz

ATI Mobility Radeon X300

No Boot. All lights, CD, fan ON

HP Compaq EVO800C

Intel Pentium 4-M 2GHz

ATI Mobility Radeon 7500

No Boot. All lights ON

[CherylG]

Sadly, I have seen quite a few of the  DV2000/DV6000/DV9000 series here on the forums go through this over the years. It was so wide spread that several gpu repair services sprang up around the country. Some did a minimal reflow while others offered a complete reball. Some even did modifications to case cooling which basically just involved drilling more holes in bottom of case.

Ironically I still have a dv2000 series-dv2810us- which withstood the test of time and went from Vista to Windows 7. Spent many hours using it daily-but usually always with laptop cooling pad underneath it. It is now semi-retired but still running.