XPS M1530 GPU Fix

Hey guys, I just spent some time getting my 1530 working again and since I was taking pictures along the way I figured I'd post it up here. Maybe the pics will be helpful to someone taking their laptop apart if nothing else.

So the story is that I fell with my laptop in my bag and dented the corner of my laptop and messed up the palm rest. The bigger problem that I didn't find out about till later was that I actually broke off one of the mounts for the GPU heatsink. So overtime the GPU started overheating because of the broken heatsink and eventually I was getting nothing but a blank screen when I turned the laptop on. So here's what I did:

Step 1: Take laptop apart



It's actually not too difficult to take the XPS apart but if its the first time you're doing it I'd suggest following a guide.

Step 2: Heat up the GPU
Get some heat shields (I had a bunch of chips/circuit boards lying around so I used those) and apply heat. A heat gun works well here. The idea is to try to re-flow the solder to help fix any broken or weak connections between the chip and the pads.

Step 3: Looking at the damage

Here you can see the missing mount for the heatsink


A better look:


Step 4: Attaching the heat sink

So I'm missing some pictures here but what I did was just put a bolt through the PCB and used a nut on the other side to hold it. I spaced the heatsink flange off the motherboard with 2 washers which ended up being about the same height as the original mount.



Step 5: Thermal Compound
I forgot to apply new thermal compound so now I have to take it apart again and do that.

Some more pictures:









That's all!

 

Great tutorial. I did the same thing with a Compal FL90 laptop