Alienware 17 R4 won't turn on

I just purchased this laptop from a private seller on Craigslist for $3xx. It's an Alienware 17 R4 with i7-6700HQ/16GB/GTX 1070 model. The laptop will not turn on at all. If I plug in the AC charger, the blue LED light goes out. That means there's a short somewhere, right? I broke down the entire laptop and pulled the motherboard. Did a visual inspection to see if I could find the short. Didn't see much visible damage, but I found 2 Vishay SiC632 Mosfets with a black colored goo on the pins. I cleaned the pins with isopropyl alcohol and tried to boot. No luck, still won't turn on.

Can it be repaired?

PICTURES

 

Bump. Any feedback would help.

 

A short may not be visible , so looking for it in the manor that you are may not yield any results. If the short is somewhere like a dead GPU core then you will get the same issue and still won't see anything visible on the board. Even prior to the soldered versions, if the MXM card failed you would gbet the same behavior.

At this point your only hope would be to trace the power leads and see if you can trace down the chip causing the problem, but to the best of my knowledge there is no schematics released that would help you with this.

Did you buy it knowing it was FUBAR? If so might as well keep tinkering and trying to find something. If you bought it and it quit right after, I would try to contact the seller, although typically all second hand purchases are final...so that may not work either.

 

Have you tried a different power supply? It could be the A/C adapter that has the short.

 

That is the famous CPU VRM failure.

First of all, desolder all 3 VRMs and measure the resistance of the CPU, maybe the "dark" marks did not affect the CPU, though there is the 1.1V rail, so small chance that CPU survived.

At least all cases I saw resulted with a dead CPU even if you have right resistance on it.

 

You can replace those mosfets but others had little succes of bringing the board back to life. It tends to take down the CPU and or GPU with it to its grave when those mosfets pop.