Seeing an expert saying he's not an good at BGA chips is refreshing for us beginners to know that even experts have their weaker points. Superb video, man 👏👏👏👏👏
Damn, this fix complexity is quite above the usual problems that you have shown us lately. It was great to see you go into the more technical problems of faulty chips in boards but everything has a limit. Great video as always mate!
Everything from your shirt, to the animations you do for the PERFECT amount of thermal paste, your professionalism, and your since of humor is why I watch all your videos! Keep up the great work
Those types of locking tab and connector are the bane of my existence, especially the incredibly small ones on the Nintendo 2DS. Those tabs pop off so easily, but don't reattach at all. What would you suggest in a situation like that? Great video, as usual, though. I love learning, and being inspired to work, from your videos.
I feel that! My first time in a joycon I broke one of those locking tabs. I couldn't find a solution on google so I just had to junk the board. It broke with the tiniest amount of force. It was insane.
Sounds like there is a short circuit somewhere deeper inside the laptop. best thing to do is get some jumper wires onto the board (which bypasses the DC jack and power limiting software) and inject voltage until whatever is shorted heats up.
Regarding laptop repairs, There are many custom-made chips that you never ever find anything on the net. The biggest problem is the spareparts. You cannot find them either. So, laptop repair means having alot of doner boards. For apple computers that might be possible but for other brands that is just not possible. BGA is a big problem. Even if you fix, you might damage components on the other side. It is double sided and other BGAs on the other side might be affected.
10 out of 10 Entertaining, Informative, Charismatic... what else to ask the is! You are crazy good bro! Keep up the good vibes and lets save the broken tech 1 at the time!
lithium ion batteries are often shown at their median voltage, not their max voltage. that battery is a 3p battery. 3x4.2 max voltage is 12.6. Median is 3x3.7 is 11.1v
Send this laptop to the The Cod3r as a repair challenge. Locking tab are easy to replace from one connector to another. In your case the locking metal side plates form the outside hinge and needs to be bent a little outside to free the plastic pins.
Regarding the battery, it is usual for the manufacturer to specify the nominal voltage (in your case 11.4V), which is simply kinda an "average" value, used to calculate the amount of energy stored in Wh (proper way is to integrate the voltage curve from full to empty, but an average works fine), just doing [nominal voltage] x [cell capacity in Ah]. The usual nominal voltage por LiPo and LiIon batteries is 3.7 volts per cell, so 11.1V on a 3S battery. When dealing with HV batteries, this nominal voltage can be a tad higher, so it is not rare to see values like 3.8V/cell (so 11.4V). However since the topping voltage is 12.6V from the schematic I assume in this case alienware is overly optimistic, because that is not HV topping voltage, is standard full cell voltage (4.2V/cell). That battery should probably have a nominal voltage of 11.1V too in order to give a proper Wh estimate, but w/e. So... well, both of the batteries looked fine to me. I see you traced down a problem with the charging IC and replaced it. Sadly no happy ending!
Great video, hate see that even with your great expertise you cannot fix it. Always enjoyable and informative keep up on the excellent content you provide.
Also many laptops use what they call LiHV cells that are regular Lithium cells with chemistries to increase service life when charged to 4.4V/cell with a total of 13.2V... Though I'm charging a modded phone battery moto-mod attachment where I use a 4.2V cell at 4.35V and researching let me know that the 4.4v is an upper-limit thing that gives more capacity with reducing capacity by a third (200 cycles versus 300 cycles service life). Most laptops that have LiHV cells seems to report a 12.9v peak charging when polling the device directly (Something Linux allows in most cases, except peasant-grade HP laptops et least) It seems that they choose 4.3v/cell for some safety margin and to give a few more cycles service life. It also explains part of why laptop batteries from 2008 can often still give 80% its design capacity and yet a battery from laptops of the 2016 and newer often don't hold charge well or swell up.
For the ball chip thing when i was young i used to work for a phone repair shop most of the times we fixed them by heating them up and just moving it a little so if any ball was connected it got fixed(usually) so you should try at least that maybe
@@BAERnado I don't know if it helped on his videos but we used to do it on the old phones until 2009 when i left. Putting flux on all the sides and heating it until you can move it just a little with a tiny touch and then try. And plenty of times it was fixed(other times not). Sometimes we removed them completely and put them back again after cleaning the board unless we broke it 🤣 but still i think its worth a try since it doesnt take more than 5 minutes
Even if you could buy the chip, there's no way you could also program it with the required code. It looked like some kind of micro. So a donor board was the only possibility to fix it.
I don't know if that laptop has a battery or not. But I would disconnect it if I were you, Steve. I have learned this the expensive way by having to repair an LVDS screen cable, and the LCD power supply circuit. And in the end if it is not fixable, send it to Northridge Fix. Alex does work on small BGA chips.
Is it possible that a resistor leading to the 5V was broken in the the surge? I dealt with a board at work earlier that had to many volts put through it and caused the resistors to crack. Of course it would be hell to track down a pin size hole or hair line fracture on *at least* one of several resistors. Are you able to check any of the parts connected to that leg of the chip using the schematic? Or would that be a waste of time?
Honestly I like your approach on stuff you are not familiar with to broaden your and our views. I would like to see you tapping on reballing though. I believe with your skillset it will be like any other journey starting with one step at a time. Basically there is nothing to lose but much to gain.
I think the chip replaced creates 2 voltages output. 3.5V (3v5). 5V. Typically the enable lines should have around 3v. Not sure if they are all enable high or enable low (en_l).
if you buy a chip to replace it it will be preballed so you could try and replace it with hot air, you don't need to reball anything, you can do it, i believe in you😁
always measure 5V and 3.3V on coils. if they are present, laptop should turn on. or at least LEDs should show something. if not, bios may be dead - reflashing will fix issue.
Said it before and will say it again, I do not understand why in the US, people pay so much for what is sold as "spares or repair". There is zero guarantee these things are fixable, and like with this board, even re-selling for spares is gonna be tough as you have no idea what is still useable other than the most obvious things that are not electrical. Here in the UK, you would take a risk at £100 maybe, but no way would you spend £300 on a spares or repair item, even if it's potential value is £700. It's like a form of gambling.
I think the problem is - you fixed the mosfet . but you will also have put it into security mode... frozen bios ... it will act like macbooks and just lock out. replace the bios chip... then u should see it come back to life :)
It would have been nice to know what type of power surge you were having to deal with since it would have given you a better picture of what you might have been facing but this is just the breaks sometimes most people don't even think of what may have surged the line.... my experience is a direct strike is pretty much a futile repair attempt, a brush where you were close to the strike like lighting not striking the power line directly but close enough to induce a high voltage on the line or you are further down the line from the strike... sometimes you may fix it. and this is the area that a good surge protector can help protect you. Or the power company drops a 220 line on your 110 and I have personally had that happen odds are much more in your favor to repair it... and then you can have a Brown out and sometimes that can fry you electronics as well and odds are pretty much in your favor to repair it... all was ask if you can, but buying on eBay your often left in uncharted territory.
Sometimes it's good to know when let it go in order to not cause any more damage but I believe Steve you would replace that last chip successfully without any BGA Station :D
@@Tronicsfix Speaks volumes for the necessity of a good surge suppressor then. Edit: they make those small single plug ones now, so it's easy peasy to have one on hand.
Reply to 13:55. As far as I know, there is not a single modern laptop which requires a battery to run. Power cable should be just fine. Actually, many batteries go bad over time, and require you to either unplug it, or replace it if you want good performance on your laptop. Since whenever the battery is low, your computer will most likely attempt to preserve the power longer by not using as much power on the cpu and gpu. Leaving you with a worse performance overall. Batteries going bad looks simular to regular low battery to the operating system. I personally had an issue with my laptop, where it kept trying to use battery settings even though it showed as fully charged. So I ended up unplugging mine and only ever using the cable to avoid the performance hickups.
@@Tronicsfix im not sure why it didn't post, i wrote like a whole paragraph LOL Anyway basically i said this: I have worked on this same motherboard before. on the CPU/GPU side of the board, check all the large main coils (all of them) for continuity to GND. Also i may have missed you doing this, but I'm not sure.. check the output of the chip you changed for continuity to GND. Im curious if the reason theres no output is because theres a short on that rail. The laptop i had came into my shop and ended up having a short on one of the coils near where you were working, 0.7ohms resistance to GND. when i injected voltage at that coil, a cap lit up on my thermal cam. sort of near the area but near what looks to be the firmware chip, there are two caps next to it. After removing the cap, the laptop came back to life. i posted a link in my comment to a google review for my business showing the laptop i worked on. im guessing that may have been the reason youtube pulled my comment, or i just hit "reply" and exited too quick, haha if you search CF Micro Repairs on google, youll find my business and the first review is the same laptop, but in white. also, the video was very well done and kept me hooked the entire time, hats off to you steve! I hope any of this info helps for this or future repairs
