Aspire 7520 project

Hello again. Wanted a lil larger lappy than the 5315 which is running great with the mods
so I found a 7520 on ebay. Appeared to be a very clean looking unit. Owner stated screen
would only light up greyish-white. Bid on the unit and won it for $92.00 plus shipping
coming out to $110.00. I purchased some parts for it as it wasn't coming with a charger
or hard drive. Bought an Anker charger from Amazon as Anker chargers and batteries
are all I'll use due to fine products and an 18 month no hassle warranty. Bought a
129 gig Samsung 840 SSD on sale at Newegg and 4 gigs of G.Skill DD2 5300.
I probably could of gone with 6400, but I didn't. Great thing was, when I got the
unit and to install the ram, I found two 2 gig sticks of Samsung 6400 in it !

Nice. Anyway back to the no screen. When plugged into an external monitor
the unit worked but there were lines and blocks, etc.. Oh boy. The
unit comes with an nvidia 8400M G card and I read there are sometimes
problems due to cold solder joints ? I don't know about that though.

I do know to get a good used one or have them repaired can be costly.
So I tried an old trick I saw over at YOUTUBE. I couldn't lose anything..

Pulled the card and the foil wrapper around the edge of it. Found 4 screws
to screw into the heat sink mount holes. Had the oven on at around 400*_
Placed the card on a cookie pan, placed THAT on the lower rack. Let card
cook for around 10 minutes. Pulled card and let cool for 30 minutes.

Reinstalled card and used GELID Extreme thermal paste as it doesn't
need a cure time like Arctic Silver 5 and does non conduct electricity,

Put it all back together, plugged in the new charger, hit the power button
and for a second or two..nothing. Then by gosh if the old familiar Acer logo
didn't show up ! was able to see all with no lines. Was able to get in BIOS
and change boot to load an OS.

I'm pretty happy about this. I like the SSD, though to be honest the WD
Scorpio Black 320 gig retail drives I've been getting from B&H Camera
for around 55.00 or so are just about as fast for half the price.

Next stop is a chip upgrade probably to a TL-64 or TL-66 and save
some money for a good vid card.

Does anyone have any suggestions for an upgrade regarding the card ?

Sorry for the long rant, hoopin' and hollerin' but this is the site that
enlightened me regarding how to restart a "dead" Acer and the very
cool mods for the venerable 5315,

Any suggestions or tips are humbly welcomed.

Thanks for looking.
n2gc

 

Ok. Unit is still working with cooked vid card, but admit colors are somewhat washed out. Have a
ATI Radeon 3650 Mobile coming and have a Turion X2 TL-66 here waiting on the card. Will pull
all the Nvidia drivers out of it before changing out the card, then after the card install I have
drivers for the 3650. Should be interesting. I probably should of gone with a less power hungry
card, but the 3650 is a 30 watt card as was the OEM.

Right now the oem card is running at 59C. That's a lil warm so I'm going to try a copper shim bewteen
the sink and chip using the Gelid thermal compound. If that doesn't work, I'll try some Shin Etsu
G-751 thermal paste.

We'll see.

Thanks for looking.

 

DONE ! New ATI 3650 card, Used but like brand new AMD Turion TL-66 2.3 chip, New thermal pads helped.

Card runs cooler than the Nvidia card as does the chip. Card now run around 49/50C, Chip runs around 46/47 C
Samsung 840 SSD runs 32/34 C.

Everything works and run pretty darn fast for an old duo core laptop from the late 2000's. Yea, I spent some money. Probably more than I should have,
but the unit itself was so very clean physically, what the heck.

Sure works nice.

Anyway, thanks for looking.

Happy Memorial Day !

n2gc

 

Nicely done

 

Thank you for the kind words !

 

Just an update. The TL-66 proved to be too much for it. Started running terrible. Sluggish took a long time to gt on the net, random BSOD's at POST, etc. Didn't know if it was the Samsung SSD or ram, etc.

Reset ram = no difference.
Replaced TL-66 with a TL-60 = easy POST, no BSOD's , easy access to net
and seems to simply run better. I have to load HW Monitor to see temps
but we'll see.

Reason why I keep updating this thread is so if any try to hot rod an old 7520
at least they'll have this to look at.

Thanks for looking

Best to ya
n2gc.

 

Maybe you could try to improve the cooling? Also what power brick do you have?

 

With the 60, temps are running at 55/58C when cores are under heavy load.
At idle the cores are now running from 35 up to 42/44 C. The new gpu card
runs at 46/49 C all day long. It just seems to run better with the 60. I still get a BSOD
with it stating sometimes. There is a prob with the mini dump, but this
only happens when it has been shut off for an extended time. When
this happens, I press the power button and it won't POST. Just a
blank screen with the HHD indicator full on, so it's not booting
right. BIOS is the very limited Phoenix BIOS not allowing me to go
to any advanced menus.

Once I press the button to power down, I'll start it up, it will POST, go to
the Windows log on then BSOD. Power down again, then everything
works as it should. When warm, it never does this. I did change out the
thermal heat pads to Berquist thermal pads and changed over to
Arctic 5 Silver compund.

I don't know, but it might be the Samsung 840 SSD,. Might be the new
ATI card, I don't know. I have a couple of extra parts like the orig card
and a spare 80 gig platter sata drive. I'll try each one and
see if it stops BSOD.

The battery is stock OEM and looks to be in great shape. The charger
is a new Anker Direct and charges nicely.

It's something simple. I DO wish the screen was brighter. At full
brightness it's like it's set at half way.

I should of looked for a fixer upper that was Intel based. This is AMD
based. My two 5315's just simply work wonderful with the mods and
being Intel based.

We'll see.

Thanks for looking.

n2gc

 

Maybe it's the MoBo. Its little brother (5520G, which shares the same motherboard) is notorious for having faulty boards. The funny thing (it's not very funny, but still) is that the motherboard usually dies BEFORE the also very faulty nVIDIA 8xxx series.

 

Gosh, I sure hope not. If that proves to be the case, then I'll try to find an Intel
mobo that will fit inside; I really like the MXM GPU system which allows for
a separate card, and this laptop is so very clean physically I'd hate to give
up on it.

Just a little while ago, I started it up and am using it now, and it POST properly
and went to desktop in about a minute. I don't know if the SSD is too fast for it
or what, but I'm going back into regedit and reset the kill time back to around
15000. I have it at 7000 and have done this with all my pc's with no issues.

This one may be the exception.