Fixing an Asus G51VX-RX05 15.6in Laptop FOR PARTS (In Surrey)

This Asus G51VX-RX05 was listed as "15.6in Laptop FOR PARTS. No hard disk. HDMI port fried". It is a gaming laptop.

I picked it up on 15Nov2011 after work from a house near my office. The owner showed me the laptop and the fried HDMI port outside. When I returned home, I checked the laptop. It has one piece of bottom cover. Once removed, I could see all the parts inside. Besides hard drive mentioned, the hard drive caddy, screws on heat sinks, memory and video card were all missing inside. I disassembled the laptop further and took the motherboard out. The HDMI port was totally fried and detached from the motherboard. All around the HDMI port was black. The owner emailed me what happened was "plugged the asus to an LG TV, cable was average quality, not sure if its TV, or cable".

To rebuild this laptop, I needed the motherboard and the video card. I did not expect that they are so expensive. The lowest prices were $230 and $190 respectively. To keep the fixing cost low, I tried non-working parts first. I found a motherboard listed as "This motherboard worked with a charged battery, but when plugged up and power button pressed it shuts down the power supply" which sounded fixable. I received this motherboard on 27Dec2011. When I plugged in the power, the green light on the AC Adapter gone. It indicated that the motherboard had short circuit. I checked the motherboard and found a component that looked weird on the soldering. The multitester read zero resistance on it while the one on the fried motherboard had reading. I swapped the component over. When I plugged in the AC Adapter again, the green light stayed on. I assembled the laptop back. One of the cable could not be inserted into the connector. I found that 2 pins inside pointed aside. I aligned them back so that the cable could be plugged in.

When I booted up the laptop, a white screen was displayed. It indicated that the BIOS screen also needs the video card. I could not test further but found the battery light was on. I let it charge a few hours until the light was off. The battery charging seemed normal.

On 30Dec2011, I located a video card listed as "TESTED IN NON WORKING CONDITION. THESE VIDEO CARDS ARE GOOD FOR PARTS OR REPAIR". I did a reflow on the nVIDIA chip. When the card was installed, the laptop started for a second and shut down immediately. This time, I didn't have luck.

After a few months, I bought a working graphic card. With the graphic card, video is back. I bought a 120GB Solid State Drive and another hard drive caddy for it. This laptop has Windows Vista COA and a DVD for Windows 7 Home Premium. I installed Windows 7 which runs very fast. However, checking the screen, it has two bright spots and one dark spot.

The battery displayed 1 hr 38 min (98%) remaining at 10:25 pm. It dropped to 50 min (73%) remaining at 10:45 pm. The battery charging drops 25% for 20 minutes and will last less than 80 minutes.

Besides the screen issue, this gaming laptop is in good condition and is ready to serve again. It was picked up on 1July2012 by a young person from Surrey who told me how to set the dual core processing from msconfig.