HP Confirms AMD Radeon 7690M Graphics for New Envy 15 and Envy 17

HP has finally put an end to the speculation and cleared the confusion as to what AMD graphics card comes on board the new Envy 15 and Envy 17, drum roll please…

The Envy 15 has the AMD Radeon 7690MThe Envy 17 has the AMD Radeon 7690M XT

Darren Gladstone of HP confirmed the final specs of the new Envy laptop graphics in his blog post here.  An AMD spokesperson also confirmed some further details about these 7600 series cards:

They will support DirectX 11They use the 40-nm fabrication processThey use GDDR5 128-bit memoryHave 480 stream processorsSupport HDMI 1.41 and DisplayPort 1.2Offer UVD3 video decodingWill allow output to 3 screens

Darren also posts some gaming benchmarks with the Envy 15 using the 7690M graphics card.  For instance, playing Just Cause 2 at 1600 x 900 resolution at medium to high settings yielded a 28.8 fps.  The Envy 17 meanwhile had an impressive 42.2 fps at the same settings for Just Cause 2.   In general it seems that the 7690M XT is going to have nearly double the performance of the 7690m in the Envy 15, so if you’re really into gaming the Envy 17 is definitely the way to go.

Relative to the last generation of Envy 15 and Envy 17, the 7690M is going to outperform the previous AMD 6770m card, but it’s not going to be a huge jump forward.  Same deal with the 7690M XT which will slightly outperform the 6850m found in the previous Envy 17.  Still to be answered also is the clock speeds being used on these cards.  Bottom line, there is still some confusion in terms of what performance will be like in models that ship because Darren says he’s using a late prototype machine which could still differ somewhat from the final version that is now ready to ship to the first people that ordered the Envy 15-3XXX and Envy 17-3XXX editions last week.

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How to fix laptop motherboard with failed NVIDIA graphics chip

In this post I explain how you can fix a laptop motherboard with failed NVIDIA graphics chip. This repair might apply to some HP/Compaq laptops and probably some other laptop brands. If this repair works for your laptop, please mention the brand and model number in comments after the post. This will help other readers with similar laptops.

This method should work for the following models: HP Pavilion dv2000, Pavilion dv6000, Pavilion dv9000, Compaq Presario v3000, Presario v6000, HP Pavilion tx1000, Pavilion tx2000.

By the way, I just fixed my son’s Xbox 360 with red ring of death (error 74) using exactly same technique.

MOST COMMON PROBLEM SYMPTOMS

1. Laptop turns on with garbled video on the internal laptop screen and external monitor.
2. Laptop turns on as normal but there is no video on the internal laptop screen or external monitor.

MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE PROBLEM

The NVIDIA graphics chip soldered to the motherboard. When the laptop gets very hot, the NVIDIA chip separates from the motherboard and laptop video fails.

HOW TO FIX FAILED NVIDIA CHIP

I have previous posts explaining how I fixed same problem by baking the motherboard in an oven or bubble-wrapping the laptop. But today I’m going to fix the motherboard using a heat gun. Basically, I’m going to heat up the NVIDIA chip with a heat gun to solder it back to the motherboard (reflow). I think this method is more reliable and the repair should last for a while.

WARNING!

There is no guaranty this method works all the time. While doing this repair you may damage the motherboard and make it unrepairable. Also, you may damage the laptop while taking it apart.
Proceed at your own risk and don’t blame me if you turned your laptop into a very expensive door stop.
If you don’t feel comfortable doing this repair, take your laptop to the repair shop.

HOW I FIXED THE MOTHERBOARD

First of all, you’ll have to disassemble the laptop and remove the motherboard. You can find laptop disassembly procedure in the service manual. If you having trouble finding the manual, leave a comment and maybe I can point you to the right direction.

In my example I’m using a motherboard removed from HP Pavilion tx2000 laptop.

In most laptops the graphics chip located under the CPU heatsink (and it has NVIDIA logo on it), so there shouldn’t be a problem locating the chip. The chip has a glossy top surface.

For this repair I’m going to use an Ecoheat heat gun EC-100.

In order to figure out how to position the heat gun and for how long, I tested it on a penny with a small piece of solder on the top.

The Ecoheat heat gun has a switch on the handle. There are two positions for the switch. Position 1 – slow. Position 2 – fast.
I used position 1 – slow.
I positioned the heat gun about 1 inch away from the penny and turned it on.

After about 40-45 second the solder started melting. After 50 seconds the solder melted completely.

To protect the motherboard from the heat I used a regular cooking aluminum foil. I cut off a piece of aluminum foil and folded it a few times to make my protection shield thicker. After that I cut off a square opening right in the middle, same size as the NVIDIA chip.

After I removed the heat sink, I had some old thermal grease stuck on the NVIDIA graphics chip. You can remove old thermal grease using alcohol swabs. It’s not necessary to make it perfectly clean. Just make sure there are no large chunks of thermal grease on the chip.

UPDATE: Some people mentioned that I should have applied some liquid flux underneath the NVIDIA chip for better results. I didn’t do it this time. I’ll definitely do it next time if the motherboard fails again. I found this video explaining how to apply liquid flux under the GPU chip. This video was made for Xbox 360 motherboard but should apply to any laptop motherboard too.

Liquid flux for GPU reflow available on eBay.

Finally, I positioned the heat gun above the NVIDIA chip about 1 inch away and turned the heat gun into the position 1.

After 50 seconds I turned it off and let the motherboard cool down for about 20 minutes.

Don’t forget to apply new thermal grease on the NVIDIA chip when you install the heat sink.
Some laptops use thermal pads instead of grease. If that’s the case with your laptop, make sure the thermal pad positioned correctly.

After I assembled the laptop back together, the video started properly!
The NVIDIA graphics chip problem fixed!
Will it last for a long time? I don’t know. Still testing.