The way you explained bypass caps is the best I've ever heard (simple/direct/good analogy) and I've tried to learn quite a bit about electronics. Thanks!!
Graham, Thanks again for another great learning video for me! I especially appreciated your analogy of cars lined up at a traffic light and starting to move at different intervals.👍👏
that laptop is clean, looks like it's never been used, no dust or dirt on the keyboard. I like this user who owns this laptop meaning they look after it :D
This is what a laptop that can edit your videos and play your games on the move looks like, if you ever need that. Not some so-called "gaming" laptop. Also thanks for explanation about the bypass capacitors, first time I see someone actually explain it properly in a video. I've always bitched about people ripping off parts and not replacing them. The early RTX 3090 instabilities should have been a good lesson that sometimes it doesn't take much to go from "good enough" to "not good enough".
With the power cutting in and out, the power rails can also get a bit 'spiky' which can be detrimental to ICs and cause them to glitch or fail. The bypass caps absorb these spikes. Always bypass caps are there to keep the supply lines steady.
Don't forget that inductance works both ways. It causes a voltage drop when something tries to draw more current quickly, but also causes a spike when current draw stops, which is far worse as that can quickly destroy the chips and transistors involved...
Another great video with loads of info teaching us how to approach this type of repairs. You make a complex task look easy and at the same time you explain it in great detail. Many thanks and looking forward to upcoming videos. Cheers from Magnus Sweden
Bypass capacitors are usually lower value and reduce digital noise, these are reservoir capacitors. Also, worth checking that the working voltage is sufficient, the new part you fitted is smaller and might not be rated high enough.
Done watching, thank you very much for the informative repair video. I have learned significantly more troubleshooting & repair lessons in this tutorial video and to your other repair videos as well compared to my ENTIRE 4 YEARS OF COLLEGE due to the rotten & outdated standards of education here in the Philippines. I hope you will soon have a mini-series for Schematic & Boardview-free Voltage/Power Rail Tracing[12V/18-20V Main Voltage Rail, 5V, 3.3V, CPU/GPU Core Voltage Rail, DRAM Voltage Rail, IGPU Voltage Rail, System Agent/Northbridge Voltage Rail, PCH Voltage Rail, BIOS Voltage Rail, Battery Power Rail], Proper method of testing/checking of potentially faulty MOSFETs & ICs/Controller Chips, CPU/GPU/PCH Reballing and BIOS Bin File Editing.
(18:39)I don't know how much time has passed but I finally see Graham detecting physical damage with the naked eye; Well, there is always a first time for everything (even what I guess you are thinking😇). A sincere congratulations. Thank you very much for sharing. All the best.
It could also be, that the laptop wouldn't power on without a battery with a reasonable amount of charge. I've had this before, with one of those beefy laptops but don't remember what model or make. The charger was able to charge the battery while running but slowly under load and the battery was required to buffer surges. Anyhow, great fix, awesome explanations and another device back on the streets. Well done!
Just fixed the exact same model, you might want to replace the same caps on the other side of the board too, on mine the top 2 were burnt and the copper evaporated under them and the bottom side had a the same cracked cap as yours too.
I have the same laptop. Only replaced the power button then maxed it out with SSDs and RAM and 90w battery. Yes it is heavy but it does fly like a rocket for an old machine. Even with maxed out settings I get 3 hrs battery.
Precisions are built to a tremendous standard - a lot of high end engineering firms have fleets of £5k+ precisions on dell repair and maintenance. A day of downtime could be £xx,xxx lost for one of these
I remember the first Alienware laptops I bought had these cards in. My M18x had two of them. Two 870m's, I think, in sli. You can still buy the cards today. I think I've seen them in medical equipment or something... A 1070 mxm ii card on Ebay, about £200.
Man, these MXM GPUs were the shit back then... You could swap out a low-end Quadro with a high-end GTX and effectively turn a workstation into a stout gaming laptop.
DAMN! I haven`t seen you in forever! I have one of these (7710) replaced the firepro gpu with a QUADRO m3000m and had so many issues with ac power and thermals, such a pain but the computer is pretty sweet when you have 64gb memory and NVME storage. the three piece suck but once you get the screws out it is not hard to re-assemble. at this point I can take it a part and have it back in 45 mins. this is a good video for me I may need it one day lol PS: At boot it takes 30 secs just to post, so ram training takes like 2 mins sometimes.
You can check to make sure that the cooling plate sits on top of the cpu/gpu properly. I had the same thermal issues until I discovered that there was about 2-3mm of space between the cooling plate and the gpu.
@@obvious7777 i think I had thst the first time because I was being lazy and just pulled the cooler of with the mobo still in the computer and then fanangled it back it, I did it right the second time, but if playing games that cause extra heat instead of the machine adding more power to the fans to cool it, it will initiate a windows shutdown. I heard this could be the ACPI driver but I haven’t messed with it. Did you have that issue as well?
@@obvious7777 cool! I plan to get back to it, my wife has been using it for Palia which she runs on high. If she sets the laptop on a hard surface its fine if she has a mouse pad or anything underneath it that is when the issue starts
@@Echo3_ Be sure to take the fans apart and clean them thoroughly, as well as the cooling fins, sometimes dust can accumulate at the point where both fan and cooler meet.
Multi-Layer Ceramic Capacitors are a bunch of metal plates stacked on top of each other. If the capacitor is damaged or cracked, the internal plates can touch each other, meaning the capacitor is effectively a wire. If this shorts a power rail to ground, the whole rail is pulled down as all the power on it goes straight to ground - like trying to fill a bucket with a massive hole in the bottom.
I really hated this era of laptop design, just such a pain to work on. It did persist quite late with some models like this, Dell's Alienware laptops around the same time used it as well. Thankfully I think it has completely ended now. It's weird how the industry suddenly collectively realised you can build a laptop without it all. Still, something interesting: Dell used to know how to build a robust hinge, look at that... threads into the aluminium body. They should study this and do it again, old XPS used to be the same as this. The slot is MXM bytheway :)
I guess when you make a laptop with some user-replaceable parts, like memory or SSDs, you need to make somewhat it idiot-proof as well, so they don't stab the motherboard with the screwdriver. Probably that's why they have those plastics. Another reason could be for the rigidity, since it's quite big, maybe it needs some reinforcements so the chasis doesn't flex as much.
Graham, I've done a little digging and should your customer approach you about a GPU upgrade you need to make sure that the MXM module is compatible with the heatsink and heat dissipation thereof. Not just any MXM module will work properly.
Genuine question here. As someone who has taken things apart, to either dislodge things jammed in by the kids or maybe just check the wiring, how do you ever not end up with the classic extra screws at the end of it all? What's your process like to deal with that?
Actually I often have the odd screw left over... sometimes it just happens. As long as you're putting important ones in, like heatsinks and stuff, it's not the end of the world. Like, say I miss one of the mobo screws, it's not like the mobo is going to fall out. These days I use the plastic sorting boxes, and then I can puts screws in a rough pattern of how they came out, or in the order they came out, and work backwards during reassembly.
Group your screws. Either with a magnetic mat, jewellery box or plain old individual magnets. For a 3-piece laptop like this I would have at least three groups: exterior screws, mid-plate screws and beneath-the-keyboard screws. Then during reassembly I know I can’t refit keyboard until I’ve used up all the screws from the beneath-the-keyboard group. Similarly I can’t refit the bottom cover until all the mid-plate screws are in place.
Those caps seemed undersized, are you sure they were rated to 20+ volts, certainly the ones in the description posted in the video are only 6.3v ones......
Yea the ones I use are 20v, but you're correct I didn't mention this in the description. Most of the time MLCCs are rated to 20v or more, but you do need to check before buying 👍
MXM slots are... rare to see these days. Most of the cards are soldered on. Making stuff repairable or more repairable would mean less electronic waste. Don't be fooled by stuff like the Framework laptop. All laptops used to be able to swap: CPU, Memory, HDD/SSD/ODD's and even screens without to much hassle.. It used to be normal.
Can using a smaller replacement capacitor package cause it to saturate more and reduce the effective capacitance at full circuit voltage? Is this a significant risk to system performance?
Main difference is that the max voltage usually goes down as you go to smaller packages, so you have to check that you're buying at least 20v caps so they'll tolerate basically any rail in the laptop. Other than that, response time actually tends to go up as the package size goes down, because less inductance, etc. This is why the modern flagship GPUs have a million tiny caps on the back of the GPU, instead of a few big ones. It's just a trade off of uF and V vs package size.
Why do many repair shops end their repairs when they know the CPU has been damaged? Is it because of limited parts or time or just most customers do not want to pay for a motherboard replacement or repair? I am just curious. Thanks.
Also even if you had another CPU, replacing the CPU is a tremendous job that will economically-write off most laptops, or at least getting another mobo will likely be cheaper/easier.
looks like a precision 7510, i worked with a fleet of 100 of these things once, and they were a nightmare. Janky garbage from the early days of NVME and "modern" chips
Thanks for teaching some sloppy guys what caps are used for (minute 21) and that they should be replaced by new ones. Yes, by new ones, not one of another old board. Caps have a life span and if you replace them with a grandpa, not a good repair job. Especially worse if you take the exact same cap from the same location on the same type of donor board. Why? Because the broken cap could have been broken because its location is stressed all the time. Might also be just a badly produced one, but you don't know that, right? So, please: Just buy a pack of new ones and use these. Don't be lazy and stubborn like for example 'Electronics Repair School'. Always remember: The board designer knows the board in and out, and he placed a cap there. Don't think you are smarter than the designer.
The way you explain minute details, you can be a great teacher in electronics.. 😊
Sorry about the weird frame-stutter on the bench-cam in this video - recording PC must've been lagging a bit, but it's hard to spot mid-record.
The way you explained bypass caps is the best I've ever heard (simple/direct/good analogy) and I've tried to learn quite a bit about electronics. Thanks!!
Graham, Thanks again for another great learning video for me! I especially appreciated your analogy of cars lined up at a traffic light and starting to move at different intervals.👍👏
Enjoyed your explanation/narrative of capacitors.
I agree with what you say in your intro. Those people stand out a mile. It is so nice to watch someone experienced and good at their craft as you are.
that laptop is clean, looks like it's never been used, no dust or dirt on the keyboard. I like this user who owns this laptop meaning they look after it :D
This is what a laptop that can edit your videos and play your games on the move looks like, if you ever need that. Not some so-called "gaming" laptop.
Also thanks for explanation about the bypass capacitors, first time I see someone actually explain it properly in a video.
I've always bitched about people ripping off parts and not replacing them. The early RTX 3090 instabilities should have been a good lesson that sometimes it doesn't take much to go from "good enough" to "not good enough".
With the power cutting in and out, the power rails can also get a bit 'spiky' which can be detrimental to ICs and cause them to glitch or fail. The bypass caps absorb these spikes. Always bypass caps are there to keep the supply lines steady.
I really appreciate that in-depth explanation and analogy on bypass caps, thank you.
Nice repair and explanation again Graham! Thanks.
HI Graham, thank for the video and clear explaination of bypass capacitor... bye Francesco timpano from Florence Italy
Don't forget that inductance works both ways. It causes a voltage drop when something tries to draw more current quickly, but also causes a spike when current draw stops, which is far worse as that can quickly destroy the chips and transistors involved...
This is a very nice DELL ..Great job!
Great explanation about caps.
Another great video with loads of info teaching us how to approach this type of repairs. You make a complex task look easy and at the same time you explain it in great detail. Many thanks and looking forward to upcoming videos. Cheers from Magnus Sweden
"This thing is built like a tank" This is why I am still holding on to my Precision M6800 from 2014.
Exactly...Me too. They are nice and tough. They're very affordable as well on Ebay.
Bypass capacitors are usually lower value and reduce digital noise, these are reservoir capacitors. Also, worth checking that the working voltage is sufficient, the new part you fitted is smaller and might not be rated high enough.
Done watching, thank you very much for the informative repair video. I have learned significantly more troubleshooting & repair lessons in this tutorial video and to your other repair videos as well compared to my ENTIRE 4 YEARS OF COLLEGE due to the rotten & outdated standards of education here in the Philippines. I hope you will soon have a mini-series for Schematic & Boardview-free Voltage/Power Rail Tracing[12V/18-20V Main Voltage Rail, 5V, 3.3V, CPU/GPU Core Voltage Rail, DRAM Voltage Rail, IGPU Voltage Rail, System Agent/Northbridge Voltage Rail, PCH Voltage Rail, BIOS Voltage Rail, Battery Power Rail], Proper method of testing/checking of potentially faulty MOSFETs & ICs/Controller Chips, CPU/GPU/PCH Reballing and BIOS Bin File Editing.
Good video. You do a good job explaining everything as you go along.
(18:39)I don't know how much time has passed but I finally see Graham detecting physical damage with the naked eye; Well, there is always a first time for everything (even what I guess you are thinking😇). A sincere congratulations. Thank you very much for sharing. All the best.
Great video and great teaching lesson!
What a beast of a laptop to take apart and great job. I always take something away from your Videos Graham thank you .
nice dig @ Sorin from electronics repair school - not replacing capacitors is his signature.
No capacitors, no shorted capacitors !
Hey, leave Sorin out of this😆... after all, no capacitor, no shorted capacitor.🤣😂😝
Great video. You make it look so easy, not for us mere mortals!
I appreciate your videos. Thanks for making them.
Love these videos man. Keep up the great work 👌
Good work brother!🍻
Good job!
thank you.
Forever hearing, in the tone of the GI Joe theme, "Graham Lord, Soldering Heroooo"
It could also be, that the laptop wouldn't power on without a battery with a reasonable amount of charge. I've had this before, with one of those beefy laptops but don't remember what model or make. The charger was able to charge the battery while running but slowly under load and the battery was required to buffer surges.
Anyhow, great fix, awesome explanations and another device back on the streets. Well done!
Glad that you sorted your nano's and micro's 😉
Just fixed the exact same model, you might want to replace the same caps on the other side of the board too, on mine the top 2 were burnt and the copper evaporated under them and the bottom side had a the same cracked cap as yours too.
I hate that so many chargers no longer have a light on them now. It's quite a useful quick check feature.
Nice job
love how you call it stabbing rather than probing LOL
Great video and more videos pls.
I have the same laptop. Only replaced the power button then maxed it out with SSDs and RAM and 90w battery. Yes it is heavy but it does fly like a rocket for an old machine. Even with maxed out settings I get 3 hrs battery.
22:09 Did I hear you saying "Sorin"? 😅... Nah "maybe next time" 😁
that one had you going Graham good job
That slot that the GPU is plugged into is an MXM slot. Used to be much more common, but it seems those are only on workstation-class cards anymore
As a former parts jockey, these were the bane of my career.
Oof, shots fired at uncle Sorin..
He wouldn't replace the Caps
Precisions are built to a tremendous standard - a lot of high end engineering firms have fleets of £5k+ precisions on dell repair and maintenance. A day of downtime could be £xx,xxx lost for one of these
I remember the first Alienware laptops I bought had these cards in. My M18x had two of them. Two 870m's, I think, in sli. You can still buy the cards today. I think I've seen them in medical equipment or something... A 1070 mxm ii card on Ebay, about £200.
Nice easy fix Graham...
Four RAM slots made my day. Cannot find that these days anymore, everything is soldered in.
Wow and detachable GPU!
nice one
feeling that capacitor message its for a nother tech..
If only my Sony Vaio from 2008 had a removable GPU, it would have survived the nvidia plague of that era.. Thank you for another informative video!
So much info in one video!! Thanks so much even though I dont understand much of it
💻👏👏👏👏
Man, these MXM GPUs were the shit back then... You could swap out a low-end Quadro with a high-end GTX and effectively turn a workstation into a stout gaming laptop.
They still sell them today. You can still buy an MXM II 1080.
DAMN! I haven`t seen you in forever! I have one of these (7710) replaced the firepro gpu with a QUADRO m3000m and had so many issues with ac power and thermals, such a pain but the computer is pretty sweet when you have 64gb memory and NVME storage. the three piece suck but once you get the screws out it is not hard to re-assemble. at this point I can take it a part and have it back in 45 mins. this is a good video for me I may need it one day lol
PS: At boot it takes 30 secs just to post, so ram training takes like 2 mins sometimes.
You can check to make sure that the cooling plate sits on top of the cpu/gpu properly. I had the same thermal issues until I discovered that there was about 2-3mm of space between the cooling plate and the gpu.
@@obvious7777 i think I had thst the first time because I was being lazy and just pulled the cooler of with the mobo still in the computer and then fanangled it back it, I did it right the second time, but if playing games that cause extra heat instead of the machine adding more power to the fans to cool it, it will initiate a windows shutdown. I heard this could be the ACPI driver but I haven’t messed with it. Did you have that issue as well?
@@Echo3_ I believe I did go to the manufacturer's website and update that driver prior to realizing that the plate was the issue.
@@obvious7777 cool! I plan to get back to it, my wife has been using it for Palia which she runs on high. If she sets the laptop on a hard surface its fine if she has a mouse pad or anything underneath it that is when the issue starts
@@Echo3_ Be sure to take the fans apart and clean them thoroughly, as well as the cooling fins, sometimes dust can accumulate at the point where both fan and cooler meet.
Nice video
Love the explanation @22:00 about holding a small charge, however I have a question why do the capacitors cause a problem if they short?
Multi-Layer Ceramic Capacitors are a bunch of metal plates stacked on top of each other. If the capacitor is damaged or cracked, the internal plates can touch each other, meaning the capacitor is effectively a wire. If this shorts a power rail to ground, the whole rail is pulled down as all the power on it goes straight to ground - like trying to fill a bucket with a massive hole in the bottom.
🤣 that new intro
Issue with the MXM cards was the limited power/cooling dictated by the laptop.
Mr Beast of a laptop . Good fix Graham.
That thing is built like a tank from WW2.
I really hated this era of laptop design, just such a pain to work on. It did persist quite late with some models like this, Dell's Alienware laptops around the same time used it as well. Thankfully I think it has completely ended now. It's weird how the industry suddenly collectively realised you can build a laptop without it all. Still, something interesting: Dell used to know how to build a robust hinge, look at that... threads into the aluminium body. They should study this and do it again, old XPS used to be the same as this.
The slot is MXM bytheway :)
If i remember those are called MXM port
No way, I just got the EXACT same model with the same problem description... Now I need to check if it is the same or not.
It’s been designed and built to all differently variants with as many common parts as possible. I doubt they care about repairablity.
I believe it is called an mxm slot for the videocard.
I guess when you make a laptop with some user-replaceable parts, like memory or SSDs, you need to make somewhat it idiot-proof as well, so they don't stab the motherboard with the screwdriver. Probably that's why they have those plastics. Another reason could be for the rigidity, since it's quite big, maybe it needs some reinforcements so the chasis doesn't flex as much.
Hi, where are you getting your leaded solder from? Thanks!
Mechanic HX-T100 on Aliexpress is reliable stuff
@ lovely thank you
👍👍😎✌️🤟
I believe the GPU card form factor is called MXM.
Graham, I've done a little digging and should your customer approach you about a GPU upgrade you need to make sure that the MXM module is compatible with the heatsink and heat dissipation thereof. Not just any MXM module will work properly.
Mxm slots, i found that in acer long time ago.
Can't tell you how much I dislike the Dell Bios screens.
Did you say the paste was crusty?
Genuine question here. As someone who has taken things apart, to either dislodge things jammed in by the kids or maybe just check the wiring, how do you ever not end up with the classic extra screws at the end of it all? What's your process like to deal with that?
Actually I often have the odd screw left over... sometimes it just happens. As long as you're putting important ones in, like heatsinks and stuff, it's not the end of the world. Like, say I miss one of the mobo screws, it's not like the mobo is going to fall out.
These days I use the plastic sorting boxes, and then I can puts screws in a rough pattern of how they came out, or in the order they came out, and work backwards during reassembly.
@@Adamant_IT a flat refrigerator magnet flipped backwards in a small plastic holder works for me.
Group your screws. Either with a magnetic mat, jewellery box or plain old individual magnets.
For a 3-piece laptop like this I would have at least three groups: exterior screws, mid-plate screws and beneath-the-keyboard screws. Then during reassembly I know I can’t refit keyboard until I’ve used up all the screws from the beneath-the-keyboard group. Similarly I can’t refit the bottom cover until all the mid-plate screws are in place.
Those caps seemed undersized, are you sure they were rated to 20+ volts, certainly the ones in the description posted in the video are only 6.3v ones......
Yea the ones I use are 20v, but you're correct I didn't mention this in the description. Most of the time MLCCs are rated to 20v or more, but you do need to check before buying 👍
Now I remember why I don't work on laptops... pain in the ring
The GPU slot is a MXM Slot it can handle MXM-B
MXM slots are... rare to see these days. Most of the cards are soldered on. Making stuff repairable or more repairable would mean less electronic waste. Don't be fooled by stuff like the Framework laptop. All laptops used to be able to swap: CPU, Memory, HDD/SSD/ODD's and even screens without to much hassle.. It used to be normal.
You should be doing voiceovers. Or documentary narration.
what's up i have a ezp2019 usb highspeed programmers disc is not picking up is there a website i can get it download i need your help
Can you teach about voltage injection? I'd like to learn more about it. Can you make a video that shows how voltage injection works?
He did. Check his videos.
4 ram slots and an mxm gpu? Wild stuff.
Can using a smaller replacement capacitor package cause it to saturate more and reduce the effective capacitance at full circuit voltage? Is this a significant risk to system performance?
Main difference is that the max voltage usually goes down as you go to smaller packages, so you have to check that you're buying at least 20v caps so they'll tolerate basically any rail in the laptop. Other than that, response time actually tends to go up as the package size goes down, because less inductance, etc. This is why the modern flagship GPUs have a million tiny caps on the back of the GPU, instead of a few big ones. It's just a trade off of uF and V vs package size.
Why do many repair shops end their repairs when they know the CPU has been damaged? Is it because of limited parts or time or just most customers do not want to pay for a motherboard replacement or repair? I am just curious. Thanks.
Because you can't buy the replacement cpu.
Even if you could get the CPU there is a thousand balls under it to connect to the motherboard, good luck with that 😂
Also even if you had another CPU, replacing the CPU is a tremendous job that will economically-write off most laptops, or at least getting another mobo will likely be cheaper/easier.
@@Adamant_IT Thank you!
@@gower1973 Thank you!
Winner winner chicken dinner.
looks like a precision 7510, i worked with a fleet of 100 of these things once, and they were a nightmare. Janky garbage from the early days of NVME and "modern" chips
This is fine. Until it isn't. Classic
Thanks for teaching some sloppy guys what caps are used for (minute 21) and that they should be replaced by new ones. Yes, by new ones, not one of another old board. Caps have a life span and if you replace them with a grandpa, not a good repair job. Especially worse if you take the exact same cap from the same location on the same type of donor board. Why? Because the broken cap could have been broken because its location is stressed all the time. Might also be just a badly produced one, but you don't know that, right? So, please: Just buy a pack of new ones and use these. Don't be lazy and stubborn like for example 'Electronics Repair School'. Always remember: The board designer knows the board in and out, and he placed a cap there. Don't think you are smarter than the designer.
LLED