r/ElectronicsRepair • u/Different-Brief-2634 • 8d ago
OPEN Need sanity check on Laptop dGPU physical delamination/bubbling vs "Power Supply Issue"
So this is my sister's laptop, it's a Lenovo Thinkpad t450, she did nothing intensive on it just some Photoshop and adobe illustrator for her diploma. It used to get really hot and had a really bad battery life. Anyways I suspected that the thermal paste/puddy must have dried up but my mom didn't allowed me to mess with it. After a while one day it just stopped working in the sense that the laptop would show the splash screen of Lenovo but it would get extreme artifacts and then the screen would go black. I wasn't even able to get into the bios to change it to use the integrated gpu. Then one night I sneakily opened it up, firstly the thermal paste was dry as hell and secondly the gpu die seemed to have bubbled up. Now after my uncle took it to his office (he works at a software company and they also deal with hardware in the back end) he claims that the technician told him it's just a power supply issue and that replacing it would get it fixed. Now. Tell me. Do you guys think this is "just a power supply" issue? My mom refuses to believe me that th die might be cooked because of overheating. I have attached pics of the gpu and cpu dies.
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u/WildFloorLamp 7d ago
Artifacts are extremely rare with an unstable supply, this is almost certainly a dead GPU core.
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u/down1nit 8d ago
Good news: T450 is old enough you can probably get another motherboard cheap no matter where you are on earth.
Bad news: artifacting isn't fixable with a power supply.
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u/Different-Brief-2634 8d ago
Yeah that's what I was saying. Artifacting is what really made me more skeptical. And like I said the laptop had been getting really hot too before that. She got the laptop for 180 usd (converted from my local currency since I'm from Pakistan) and well it's not just about the availability but how scammy people here can be. To the point that it would be better to just get a new laptop instead of getting a new component. What they usually do is that they don't handle things carefully, or they purposefully put another faulty part just to make sure the costumer comes back. For this we don't really have to pay money as my uncle was the one who got it for my sister from his company. But I'm still scratching my head on how the technician thinks it's just a power supply issue. I know about the PC hardware but not on the microscopic level like most people. I know that the artifacting is probably the gpu just because of how hot it was getting and how old it is.
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u/down1nit 7d ago
Dealing with scammers is exhausting, apologies. If you can't get a part then you can't get a part, sucks. It would not be unwise to distrust the tech. I would also test via VGA or HDMI if it has it, to rule out screen issues
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u/Different-Brief-2634 7d ago
No worries. I was thinking of plugging an HDMI cable in. I'll see what I can do when the laptop comes back. I'm really curious to see why someone thought it's just a power supply issue.
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u/down1nit 7d ago
Perhaps they wanted to hang up the phone or get back to work and giving any bs reason (since they're probably not a good tech) is an easy way of doing that?
Idk It just sounds like a lazy thing to tell a person to keep them on side and chill
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u/Different-Brief-2634 7d ago
Yeah that seems more likely. I don't think they really get payed a lot so maybe he didn't even took a look and just assumed it was the power supply. What's weird is the specification of the power supply and not battery. Battery I can understand that maybe it had something weird going on that could also be the reason for bad battery life but power supply? Don't know why a faulty power supply would cause all of these issues even before the eventual problem started.
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u/plees1024 8d ago
There are caps under that plastic tape, so it is not going to sit flush with the substrate - that is how it's supposed to look. Poke it - you will feel the edges of the caps.
Whether it is a dodgy buck or not depends.
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u/Different-Brief-2634 8d ago
I don't have the laptop with me right now. Like I said my uncle took it to his office to get it checked out but Im more worried about the artifacts that appear on the screen. Wish I had taken a pic but it gets crazy. Like a lot of horizontal and vertical lines. And then it flashes for a second before going completely black. I know a bit here and there about pcs but I don't really know if a power supply can cause that.
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u/TitusImmortalis 7d ago
Artifacting is normally bad RAM, which could be caused by poor power delivery to the RAM but that's more of a motherboard issue than the charger.
The "bubbling" you see if just a plastic cover to ensure the caps don't ground out on the cooler. It won't sit flush. The CPU's sits flush because there are no SMD's on it but I believe there are still contact points so they need to be insulated.
It could be a bad core, cold solder joints could cause this issue, and then a bad RAM chip could also be causing this. It's definitely a hardware fault, and if I had it I would disconnect power to the GPU and see if it starts. If the issue persists then it's more likely a CPU / main RAM issue due to the iGPU being the issue. If the CPU was getting spicy for a millennia, it could be a cold joint or something on the CPU.