Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO Xi 1546 (Ultimate Retro Machine)

Soooooo... In pursuit of a perfect old laptop, I bought for 20$ this machine.

Code:

Processor: Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T5600 (2M Cache, 1.83 GHz, 667 MHz FSB)
GPU: ATI Mobility Radeon X1800 (12 Pixel / 6 Vertex; 256Mb DDR3; 256Bit) (8.371.0.0)
Display: 17.1 inch 16:10, 1440 x 900 pixel (Samsung LTN170X2-L02)
Chipset: Intel 945PM (Calistoga-PM) + ICH7-M/U
Storage: HDD 500Gb, Western Digital, 5400rpm (WDC WD5000BEVT-00A0RT0)
Wireless: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
Ethernet: RealTek Semiconductor RTL8169 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
RAM: 2Gb 333 MHz (DDR2-666)
Audio: Intel 82801GB ICH7 - High Definition Audio
Connectivity: 4 x USB 2.01 x IEEE 1394 (i.LINK, FireWire)1 x ExpressCard
Dimension: W x D x H / 407 x 295 x 42

ATI X1*** series is the last GPU that supports old windows games properly. I've got several questions on this machine if there is anyone alive who saw this PC.

- There are no GPU temperature sensor, right? Why?
- Any way to control fan other than via NHC? Don't wanna buy deprecated software
- I don't understand how thermal tubes work here, my GPU and CPU are hot, but when I touch copper near cooler it's not that hot, I thought these tube transfer hear immediately. Maybe this model had some known defects on tubes?
- GPU death is a common thing here or not?
- Any place where I can find spare parts for it?

 

Spare parts most likely will be only available used on eBay.

If you say that the heatsink isn't all that hot near the fins, its expected to be cooler on the finned area.

Start by a full teardown, clean everything, repaste, clean the fan impeller and maybe add a drop of oil into the shaft/bushing of the fan given its age.
Test you GPU with some benchmark program, to check that its working, lots of old GPU's have defects on the solder between the IC itself and the carrier that causes then to malfunction after years of thermal cycling.

 

Ye, already found speakers and second-hdd cable, things I'm interested in. And they cost 35USD together, lol.

Surprisingly video card in this laptop is alive, with no memory errors and so on. And that's strange cause fan and cooling system was completely blocked by dust. Plus the previous owner was a heavy smoker, so it was a mess inside.

 

Hah, my god this thing brings back memories. Had one of these brand new, what, 14 years ago?
From memory at the time I seem to remember using ATItool on the thing.

I loved it but I did have one with a faulty GPU at the time so needed to go through a whole rigamarole of getting it tested, and I seem to remember the first one also had an issue where it could crash if the volume wheel on the side of the unit was turned to max? My mind could be playing tricks on me though. I seem to remember the GPU being OK, but that it disappointed me at the time, it felt so crippled compared to desktop cards and could never really push the 1440x900 in modern games at decent settings (games like FEAR 1...)

I believe mine was the higher end unit they brought out which had a T7200 so was a bit more powerful than your unit, but upgradeable

 

Hello, nice retro machine!
I still own an old Fujitsu 17", even older than yours with a Turion 64 ML-37 (mono core 2Ghz) and a GeForce 6800 256Mo. It's stll using the old good IDE port for HDD but i changed the DVD drive for a caddy and a 1To HDD, working fine with Win XP.
You can still found some used parts on Ebay but take care, lots of sellers will not test parts and/or have them for years... I remember buying 3 or 4 ati x1800 mxm to try, there was missing CMS on all of them and one did fry my MB... You can look on Aliexpress too for cheap RAM upgrade
EDIT : No readable temp on these old GPU, the X1800 is an update to the X800 core. I have some X700 Mobility as spare parts and none of them have a readable temp sensor. You can try an old version of HWmonitor, but i don't think you'll be able to see a lot more info.
About the heatsinks, this is normal and as you said. Hot on the chips, colder near the fan. Just check there is no dust in the exaust near the fan and maybe do a repaste if not done yet.

 

I have the 1547 model since 2007 or 2008 and just 4 months ago its graphics got cooked.
I had upgraded its MXM with an NVidia with 1 GB VRAM, upgraded its DRAM to 4 GB and added a 2nd 500GB disk while still on Win XP.
Later I replaced its BIOS with a similar one from Alienware, patched it and installed Win 7 on it.
It was great as a replacement for weights as well as a heater, but also worked great at 1920x1200 until 4 months ago (no games though, just 3D graphics applications) when the GPU gave up its ghost before I had time to clean up the laptop and repaste the chips.
I put back its original AMD MXM, got lots of noise on the screen, backed up some files and switched it off. Two months later I tried again but it wouldn't even show anything on the screen and just kept trying to start the disk.
And that was the end of it. The type of MXM it needs, is hard to find nowadays and in any case they'd be useless with todays applications. Too slow, not enough VRAM, old drivers, etc. Battery packs have also disappeared from the market.

All in all, it was a fun machine to have for the needs of its early years. Too bad it had such a lousy airflow and kept overheating otherwise it would still be alive today.

 

This laptop is a perfect thing for my purpose - old games. It has big screen and its videocard is the last and most powerful dx9 card that launch old games without special mods \ fixes and other stuff. Native play, that's what i was seaching. And it's sad that they've implemented such bad cooling solution. I bought several laptops of this model and all of them had videocard issues. Eventually i found new x1900 on ebay and now play games only with fan on max speed, but i think it won't save it cause cooling is imperfect in this machine...