Intel Chipset blew up????

OptimusRhyme0110 · June 3, 2020

Hello,

I have a problem. A Louis Rossman Type problem. I have a MSI ge62 laptop purchased in December 2016 and recently the display started having some issues. Too much hinging. I bought a replacement cable from the usual scumbags and tested that the display worked with the cable before I put the laptop back together. It was working just fine (cable also supplies signal to webcam, did NOT test on first pass). I go to put the laptop back together, blah blah blah, I plug in the power cord, push the power button and at the same time I hear a *Snap* and the computer doesn't turn on. I take it back apart and delve deep and I see that the Intel Chipset (HM170?) is blown. I don't know what I could have shorted to get that kind of reaction.

My questions are:

Is it worth finding a repair shop? (part doesn't seem to be very expensive, but labor is.)

Is this the only thing that blew? The chipset seems to have its hands in everything, should I be worried about RAM, storage, CPU etc. or would they all be fine?

Just wondering what you guys think.

BobVonBob · June 3, 2020

That is well and truly blown to smithereens. Shops that will try to fix something like that are uncommon, shops that will fix something like that well are even less common, and you'll probably end up paying hundreds for the privilege. My only concern for other components would be whatever nuked that chip could have also nuked other things in the system, since chips generally don't explode like that unless something has gone incredibly wrong.

WereCatf · June 3, 2020

8 minutes ago, OptimusRhyme0110 said:

Is it worth finding a repair shop? (part doesn't seem to be very expensive, but labor is.)

Is this the only thing that blew? The chipset seems to have its hands in everything, should I be worried about RAM, storage, CPU etc. or would they all be fine?

Replacing such large BGA-packages is quite a bit of work and probably not worth the cost. That said, I would hazard a guess that it is the only thing that did blow. Obviously, there's no way of knowing 100% without actually testing.

porina · June 3, 2020

Hard to tell the failure mode from the photo. I wouldn't think the chipset would be able to kill itself thermally under normal conditions so the question will be why did this happen at all? Sourcing and replacing the chip will not be trivial, and there's no guarantee even if you did that nothing else was damage. In particular, something else might have failed to cause this to happen.

I had a GE62 6QF die previously. No visible physical damage. At the time I did seek out replacement motherboards, as there isn't really any smaller unit you can easily replace. The pricing I saw was not much short of getting a new laptop, so I did that instead. I did salvage/reuse the SSD and ram, but pretty much everything else isn't worth reusing.