Laptop GPU Upgrade With Just A Little Reballing

October 2, 2024 by Arya Voronova 5 Comments

Modern gaming laptops are in an uncomfortable spot – often too underpowered for newest titles, but too bulky to be genuinely portable. It doesn’t help they’re not often upgradeable, so you’re stuck with what you’ve bought – unless, say, you’re a hacker equipped some tools for PCB reflow? If that’s the case, welcome to [TechModLab]’s video showing you the process of upgrading a laptop’s soldered-on NVIDIA GPU, replacing the 3070 chip with a 3080.

You don’t need much – the most exotic tool is a BGA rework station, holding the mainboard steady&stiff and heating a specific large chip on the board with an infrared lamp from above. This one is definitely a specialty tool, but we’ve seen hackers build their own. From there, some general soldering tools like flux and solder wick, a stencil for your chip, BGA balls, and a $20 USB-C hotplate are instrumental for reballing chips – tools you ought to have.

Reballing was perhaps the hardest step of the journey – instrumental for preparing the GPU before the transplant. Afterwards, only a few steps were needed – poking a BGA ball that didn’t connect, changing board straps to adjust for the new VRAM our enterprising hacker added alongside the upgrade, and playing with the driver process install a little. Use this method to upgrade from a lower-end binned GPU you’re stuck with, or perhaps to repair your laptop if artifacts start appearing – it’s a worthwhile reminder about methods that laptop repair shops use on the daily.

Itching to learn more about BGAs? You absolutely should read this article series by our own [Robin Kearey]. We’ve mostly seen reballing used for upgrading RAM on laptop and Raspberry Pi boards, but seeing it being used for an entire laptop is nice – it’s the same technique, just scaled up, and you always can start by practicing at a smaller scale. Now, it might feel like we’ve left the era of upgradable GPUs on laptops, and today’s project might not necessarily help your worries – but the Framework 16 definitely bucks the trend.

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Thinkpad 13 Gets NVMe Support With Three Jumpers

September 29, 2024 by Arya Voronova 17 Comments

Hardware restrictions can be unreasonable, and at times, it can be downright puzzling just how arbitrary they are. Such is the case with the Lenovo ThinkPad 13 — it’s got a M.2 M-key socket, yet somehow only supports SATA SSDs in it, despite the CPU being new enough to support both SATA and NVMe effortlessly. [treble] got one of those laptops from a recycler, and decided to figure out just what this laptop’s deal is.

Armed with schematics, she and her friend looked at the M.2 implementation. The slot’s schematic sure looked ready to support either kind of drive, a surprising find. Here’s the catch — Lenovo only populated components for SATA drive support. All you need to switch from SATA to NVMe support is three magnet wire jumpers, or zero-ohm 0402 resistors, and voila; you can now use the significantly cheaper kind of M.2 drives in your ThinkPad.

All is documented, and [treble] even mentions that you could increase the link speed by adding more PCIe lane capacitors that Lenovo, again, left unsoldered. UEFI already has the modules needed to boot from NVMe, too – it’s an outright upgrade for your laptop with just a soldering iron’s touch required, and a reminder that proprietary tech will screw you over for entirely arbitrary reasons. Now, it’s not just laptops you can upgrade with a few resistors — same goes for certain electric cars.

DIY Gaming Laptop Built Entirely With Desktop Parts

August 13, 2024 by Lewin Day 23 Comments

Gaming laptops often tend towards implementing more desktop-like hardware in the pursuit of pure grunt. But what if you were to simply buy desktop hardware yourself, and build your own gaming laptop? That would be very cool, as [Socket Science] demonstrates for us all.

The project began with lofty goals. The plan wasn’t to build something rough and vaguely laptop-like. [Socket Science] wanted to build something of genuine quality, that for all intents and purposes, looked and worked like a proper commercial-grade laptop. Getting to that point took a full 14 months, but the final results are impressive.

Under the hood lies an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and a XFX Radeon RX6600, hooked into an ITX motherboard with some low-profile RAM sticks. Those components were paired with a thin keyboard, a touchpad, and a portable gaming monitor. Getting all that into a thin laptop case, even a custom one, was no mean feat. Ports had to be cut down to size, weird ribbon cables had to be employed, and heatsinks and coolers had to be rearranged. To say nothing of all the work to 3D print a case that was strong and actually worked!

The full journey is quite the ride. If you want to go right back to the start, you can find part one here.

We’ve seen some builds along these lines before, but seldom few that get anywhere near this level of fit and finish. Oftentimes, it’s that kind of physical polish that is most difficult to achieve. All we can say is “Bravo!” Oh, and… video after the break.

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PC-9800 Boot Sounds For Modern Computers!

August 4, 2024 by Alexander Rowsell 24 Comments

There have been many computers that played a little jingle to greet you upon booting. The NEC PC-9800 is a famous example, though almost all the Macintosh computers played either the soothing “booting” chord or sometimes the Sad Mac “error” chord. And of course, consoles have long played music on startup, with the original PlayStation boot music heralding a whole new era of video games. But modern machines don’t do anything, except maybe a single beep if you’re lucky. So why not pop in this M.2 card (JP) and bring some quirky flair to your PC?

While this particular card is aimed at the Japanese market and specifically evokes the PC-9800, we hope to see some hackers creating projects bringing other custom boot sounds to laptops and PCs around the rest of the world! A simple microcontroller, DAC, speaker and flash storage for the waveform would be all that’s required. It could even be capacitively coupled into the system’s sound output for some extra nerd points. You could pull the ultimate prank and have your friend’s laptop play the opening notes to “Never Gonna Give You Up” upon boot. Or you could have your favourite hacker movie quote play – “I can trace her physical location by looking at the binary!”. Brilliant!

In the meantime, if you want one of these cards, you’ll likely have to use a Japanese mail forwarding service as the cards are only available from Japanese retailer Kadenken — though for only ¥2880, or just under $20 USD, which is a great deal.

[via Techspot]

A Lenovo Yoga with a mechanical keyboard, held up by its creator.

Mechanical Keyboard + Laptop = Clacktop

July 18, 2024 by Kristina Panos 20 Comments

What do you do when your laptop keyboard breaks for the second time? Well, most people might use an external keyboard until they couldn’t take it anymore and bought a new machine. But [Marcin Plaza] isn’t most people.

It took more than twelve hours of CAD, but [Marcin] redesigned the case to be at least twice as thick as the Lenovo Yoga that inspired this project in order to accommodate a slimmed-down mechanical keyboard. Further weight-loss surgery was required in order to make the keyboard fit, but the end result is kind of a marvel of engineering. It’s marriage of sleek modernity and early laptop chonky-ness, and we love it.

Lacking a complete metal fab shop of one’s own, [Marcin] elected to have a board house fab it out of titanium and was quite surprised by the result. We really like the clear acrylic bottom, into which [Marcin] drilled many holes for airflow. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break.

Did you initially wonder whether the new case was printed? That’s totally a thing, too.

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The MXM card with the 3dfx chip in the center, black silkscreen, mounted on the MXM to PCIe adapter, green silkscreen

An MXM Take On The 3dfx Voodoo

June 7, 2024 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

[sdz] of Vogons forum brings us an unexpected device for the 21st century – a 3dfx Voodoo 4 card in MXM format, equipped with 64MB of RAM. This isn’t just a showpiece – this card actually, properly works when installed into our hacker’s Dell Precision M4800, and [sdz] tells us more on how the card came to be.

Equipped with a VSA-100 GPU, this card has a whole lot of support components for adapting old interfaces to modern ones. There’s a PCIe-PCI bridge IC, an FPGA, HDMI muxes, and a Realtek scaler for video conversion. Handling all the MXM interfaces would’ve been downright impossible, so the card also holds an LVDS header for the M4800’s panel. Plus, for testing all of it, [sdz] has developed a PCIe to MXM adapter board with minimal circuitry needed to have the card work – this is a seriously involved hack and it’s executed remarkably well.

The forum post shows a whole lot of the journey, from receiving the PCBs to code and FPGA gateware bringup, as well as videos of VGA and HDMI operation. In the end, our hacker shows us a fully working setup, the 3dfx card inserted into M4800 and driving its display, as well as overclocking experiments; the author has promised to open-source the card files in due time, too. It’s seriously nice to see DIY MXM cards in the wild, and if you ever wanted to build one, we’ve got an article tells you everything you could want to know about the MXM standard.

We thank [Misel] for sharing this with us!

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Give Your Thinkpad X1 Nano An Internal USB Port

June 2, 2024 by Arya Voronova 16 Comments

How hard could it be to add an extra USB port inside your laptop? As [Joshua Stein] shows, it can be decently hard, but you will have fun along the way. His journey involves a Thinkpad X1 Nano, and his tech setup means it’d be most comfortable for him to have a USB port inside its case, for a Logitech mouse’s USB receiver. It wasn’t smooth sailing all throughout, but the end result is no doubt beautifully executed.

M.2 B-key, A-key and E-key slots have USB 2.0 available on them – you’d think that’s perfect for such a receiver, and there’s even plug and play adapters for this on places like eBay. Unfortunately, none of these, as Lenovo implements wireless card whitelists to this day. Tinkering with the whitelist on [Joshua]’s laptop resulted in BIOS digital signature check failures, and the USB-connected fingerprint reader was ultimately chosen as the most viable path.

Initially, he’s tested the fingerprint reader with an FPC breakout, having the USB connection work – many a hacker would stop here, pulling a few bodge wires from the breakout. [Joshua], however, raised the bar, creating a flexible PCB that would pull the fingerprint connector signals to a spot in the case where the USB receiver could fit neatly, with a 5 V step-up on the board, too.

[Joshua] tops it off by showing a 3D-printed spacer that goes into now-vacant spot where the fingerprint reader used to be. This mod is not open-source as far as we can see, but it’s definitely an inspiration. Want to put even more USB devices inside your laptop? Perhaps a tiny USB hub would help, in line with the EEE PC mods that aimed to stuff the tiny laptop with the largest amount of USB devices possible.