Found a place here in the L.A. area that does laptop reflow services for GPUs. I have a T43 with a bad m/b, likely the south bridge chip, which I might let them try and fix. Since I plan to replace the m/b, there's nothing to lose.

What's a good price for the work? They want $75.

A reflow is pretty much worthless since you could do that yourself, and it won't last very long. $75 is even a little high for a professional re-ball job since you can buy re-balled boards for less.

The link Neil supplied is to boards I've reballed and are sold through The Board Room.

Years ago I started in this business reflowing, that is to heat the chips up until the solder balls (hopefully) melt, the idea being that any broken solder joints are remade. Whilst this is good in theory, in practice some of the balls are so past it or have moved too much out of position that not all the joints are remade properly.

Also on the later boards (post June 2006) lead-free solder only was to be used, that that suffers from a number of issues which reheating doesn't solve and these chips have to be reballed, ie removed and replaced with a new set of solder balls.

Regarding the longevity of those early reflow-only repair boards, some were OK, but a lot of others failed for the reasons mentioned above, and with us now doing reball only it's quite rare to get any returns, and those tend to be from Thinkpads which have been heavily used and "abused" and have failed again due to flexing issues - even so they will last for at least a year which I consider to be reasonable.
The normal use ones we never see again!

I'd be very interested in some details on this LA company, and if it helps to give an opinion on them. RBS and myself set up The Board Room because we couldn't find any USA based company who were any good at reballing, so there's no doubt there is a market out there for such a company.

Price-wise, $75 is high but if they are reballing both GPU and Southbridge then it's probably OK. Incidently both chips should be done since if one goes the other's usually not far behind.

I found the company in an ad on Craigslist

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/sfv/sy ... 18627.html

haven't had a chance to check them out yet

Given the ad, don't even bother checking them out...

Oh deary me!!

I started off writing a whole lot but realised it was more general information about reballing and reflowing issues that had nothing to do with this topic, so I've I've posted it in Off Topic here.

Onto this one, these lot don't have a clue and make a whole lot of misleading and erroneous statements, typical of non-technical people who are out to try and frighten, impress, and finally draw in potential customers.

Please don't use them, you're likely to just waste your money and become very frustrated.

This comes from someone who does this work every day - today we've successfully reballed the ATI GPU and Intel Southbridge on a MacBook Pro - I'd like to see these jokers doing that!

thanks for the advice, it was worth a look (almost!)