BGA Venting Thread ;)

Yeah they've got inertia going for them. It's like they're running on whipped cream. I always said I'd get another one day but they're pretty high maintenance unfortunately.

 

Yeah, inertia can be used in amazing ways. Just like 2-stroke motorcycle engines. Torque is nice to have, but extremely high RPM is really hard to stop and can be lethal when speed is job #1. Kind of like how clock is king on computers. I've seen rotary-powered Mazdas kicking some major V8 booty, and 2-stroke motorcycles with half as much engine displacement winning quarter mile sprints. The old Yama-hammer RD500 was a good example of it... wicked bike.

 

Anyone knows if Clevo laptops support APT-X?

 

I found the APT-X codec on NBR forums actually!

Great job to the original poster!!

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/intel-aptx-driver-download.794032/

 

I might take it to a dyno as the engine can put out 140bhp if tweaked

 

You mean overclock it?

 

Good thing about it being turbo is it's fairly straightforward and harmless to just up the boost a little.

I find it interesting how a lot of who enjoy over clocking were (or are) into modding engines at some stage.

 

And just like computers, you "overclock" the engine and you start breaking other stuff just to keep up. I've had to upgrade so much gear to keep up with mine and I haven't even gone forced induction yet (LS2 ~400rwhp).

Works both ways I've found. A lot of guys I know who get into car tuning/modding flow over into computing. I guess it's just the "engineer" mindset of wanting to know how stuff works.

Only difference is, the price of what you're going to blow up

 

And how spectacular the explosion of getting it wrong tends to be too.

 

A bit more serious than a BSOD... cant reboot back to stock quite as easily when internals become externals.

 

Especially if those internals happen to be organic in nature

 

damn this bga liver

 

surface pro 5








no thunderbolt, no usbc
keyboard sold separate
pen sold separate


someone needs a noose treatment at microsoft

 

Apple already charges that much for ULV CPU laptops

It's silly that people are so sucked in to these thin no-performance laptops.

There may be use cases for that level of power, but then the fair price would be in the under $500 range.

 

Oh yeah, an i7 / 16 / 1T mbp13 is 2800...

 

ULV CPU's cost more than 7700/7820BGA But yooo get 4000 MHz (1 core) We live in a sick, sick world

 

Actually, this is... Well then...

 

Iris pro CPUs have always carried a LARGE premium.

 

Back from Japan trip, did some testing along the way with a early 2011 13-inch Macbook Pro

Now I can see why people want BGA laptops, they are easier to move around with especially when backpacking (which is what my trip is mostly about). Or rather, you will need every weight and size reduction you can get.

Seeing that I will go on more trips soon, I am starting to reconsider my laptop choices but I really want to be able to maintain my laptop too.

Thankfully I don't have to make the final decision now

 

large premium for a useless chip which is power limited, cannot boost to full clockspeed, cannot be overclocked

even a cheapo 940mx would be better choice

 

Depends on the form factor really, all integrated is a lot smaller and easier to cool and means that under pure CPU loads you can bring all the cooling to bear.

 

While I'm not decisively anti-BGA as I can see it's usefulness in certain use cases, I myself don't have any use for BGA and I despise BGA stuff in the high-performance segment.
I do carry my XMG U727 (and previously the Alienware M18x-R2) around almost daily to and from work, frequent business trips (often out of country), to customers, to the university, to friends for a gaming night, etc.. I also carry it around the house and the yard/pool as well as the yacht and lake when I go out for a longer while.
I don't have any problems carrying it around, but I used to be a professional athlete and am still in good enough shape so weight isn't really an issue.

I also have a rugged/waterproof 8" tablet (along with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse) that I like to use in wet situations (in the bath tub, jacuzzi, pool, rain, etc.) that I also carry in my backpack along with the laptop for non-power-use as well as taking quick notes and reading eBooks and such.

 

Hello, reading and trying to decide between BGA and LGA for long term use (5 years-ish which my Dell M6600 lasted).
I'm considering various 15.6" Clevo chassis (although I am a bit worried having read the complaints about the keyboards). There don't seem to be too many users of the P751DM2 on these boards which would be the LGA version of both CPU and GPU.
However I can see that Clevo have recently had history of not allowing easy upgrades between generations (I think I read on another thread that early adopters of the P870DM were told it wouldn't be possible to upgrade to 10x0 series GPUs).
Does anyone know if this is just an aberration, or if they will continue to do this in future, where even if you want to upgrade GPU you won't be able to?

 

Successful MXM GPU Upgraded Laptops
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/successful-mxm-gpu-upgraded-laptops.805136/

-p870dm with MSI Gtx1070

 

We'll see if Clevo has nailed the graphics design at the next crossroads. If you are looking for a 15.6 inch laptop... Look at this one. FULLY socket hardware!! BGA

 

A custom socket card is nice for repairs but without uniformity then it makes little difference in the future usually as upgrades are hard to come by and usually cards are too expensive to replace anyway 3-5 years down the line.

 

This is the biggest part of the problem that seems to be getting worse as we increasingly see more and more BGA and MXM becoming less ubiquitous.
The 100% premium on GPU parts needs to stop before they totally kill the viability of upgrading.

 

Not likely to ever happen. Look at the price of mini-ITX boards; some are as expensive as the high-end ATX boards themselves, and don't even have as many PCIe slots. Many SFF builds easily exceed the price of notebooks, and at that rate a decent notebook with soldered parts like the Clevo P650HS-G looks like a very viable option; $1700 - $1800 for an unlocked i7-7820HK and a GTX 1070 is quite decent.

 

AMD actually recently cited (in a stream) similar reasoning as to why there's only 1 publicly available ITX board for Ryzen so far. At least, in how the logic translates to notebooks/laptops.

Basically, making the ITX boards actually increases costs because it takes much more thought and design with such limited space. Thus, none of the big manufacturers have gotten around to it yet since ITX is a double-whammy of small/niche market to sell to and higher development cost. That's also why they often jam as much stuff on there as possible (dual NICs, WiFi/Bluetooth etc). It both justifies the price and helps cover the development of the board.

Same logic applies to notebooks basically.

 

Then again the first highnperformance boards were cheaper. But there will be a premium yes and MXM boards have always had a large one, it's just the desktop cards got more expensive too.

 

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/44039-eu-delivers-a-nightmare-to-disposable-electronics

 

I can see the response already:

Hey EU, check it out! Our products are fully repairable! if you have a bga soldering station

 

Just bought myself a P157SM, should be fun to play with for a few years until we get more Ryzen options in the market

 

I'm hoping we'll see them sooner than that.

 

I'd like to think so too, but time will tell.

In the mean time I always wanted to try my hand at a Clevo type laptop, one of the few brands Ive yet to own.

 

You did make a very good choice with the P157SM then, they're very easy to work on and solid enough to last you for a while.

 

Thanks! Was actually looking for a 4900mq in a cheap m4800 but the p157sm showed up and was cheaper than anything else available on ebay. I believe I can put a 980m in it, coming from the m5100 I have now it will be a solid upgrade.

 

Not sure what 980m card/kit availability is like but I'm pretty sure I've seen that upgrade work for a few other users here.

 

Yeah me neither, havent found anything model specific yet as first I am trying to figure out which model 980m has 6 vrms (iirc?) vs the standard 3. If I am to bother upgrading I want to make sure I can get the most out of the card.

Its a bit of a bummer that I cant get a 120hz screen for it. Im looking forward to messing with it and seeing how far I can push the platform.

 

Awesome. Nice article. Thanks for sharing it. That kind of action is way past due. I wish the sheeple in North America would get with the program. It would be wonderful to see a death blow dealt to all of the disposable garbage electronics. Non-removable components suck and it should be against the law everywhere. If there is a possibility of degradation or failure, it needs to be made serviceable with all such parts easily replaced without any need for purchasing a replacement product or a larger and more costly part assembly, such as a motherboard with permanently attached elements that are typically serviced as replacement parts. CPU, GPU, memory, WiFi and Bluetooth modules, screens, batteries, keyboards, input devices and storage should all be required to be serviceable standalone items as a condition of being eligible for sale.

 

The Fudzilla article is really only a copy/paste job from the original article posted on the EC news website two days previously, I guess that's partly why the grammar is so bad.

This legislation, which is yet to be voted into EU law and then would need to be adopted into individual EU country's laws, actually has its basis in environmental protection and waste management - nothing really to do with consumer rights, product longevity until it got further down the road. The quote about 77% of people who would rather repair a product than replace a product was part of a studdy conducted in 2014 regarding household waste. The statistic specifically refers to repairing opposed to throwing away and purchasing a replacement, not quite how it's been reported by some MEPs who are paraphrasing it or not giving the complete context of the question.

Not that any of this really detracts from how products could be affected if the legislation does come into law. The primary intent is to reduce waste by allowing batteries to be replaced in closed systems. One side effect of this is that the legislation will now cover more aspects than just batteries - but It's not in any way going to affect CPUs and GPUs in BGA laptops. Assuming legislation goes through, the language (as always) will be key; but it's not going to change products core functionality. For example, making the battery in a phone more easilly removable is 100% possible - but it could have the effect of making the phone thicker which is one thing that manufacturers would argue against. However it's not going to, nor is it intended to, have any effect whatsoever on BGA CPUs or GPUs, I would also argue not on BGA RAM or SSDs.

 

That or a healthy repair market where BGA chips are freely available would be good.

 

That would certainly make it not as bad. But, it would still add totally avoidable hassle and add unnecessary costs to repairs and make cherry picking or SKU upgrades extremely cumbersome. I bet there isn't, and probably would not be, much of a market for used BGA CPUs (that would be sketchy at best) like there is for used socketed CPUs. All of my mobile Extreme and HEDT CPUs were purchased second hand for 50-75% less than their new retail price, yet they ran and worked flawlessly.

 

I think the inevitability will just be that if everything goes BGA then you'll just see more and more repair shops with re-flow machines. Eventually it'll drive prices down (of both the labour and the re-flow machines), people will get more proficient at it and once there's competition it'll probably cost $50 + part to replace a BGA cpu/gpu.

Re-flow machines are still quite beneficial for replacing any number of other chips. e.g. PCH failure is a relatively big one which often contributes to "motherboard" failures when in reality it's just 1 chip.

 

It will go exactly as it's gone with Apple. They won't provide 3rd party repair businesses with replacement parts. They'll only be left with dodgy meathods of obtaining parts which half the way time don't work.

Watch some of Louis Rossman's on it. He goes into great detail about it as he deals with it every day.

What you proposed here is the best possible scenario BGA could have had. But it's already not like that and will never be.
I think you're all forgetting - BGA isn't here to make life easier for you. It's not here as an viable alternative or lifestyle choice to socked chips for people who want thin devices. They don't want you replacing parts and they're doing a very good job so you can't.

It's here so you have to throw your $3000 machine down the toilet and buy a new one. If you're not paying warranty subscriptions or simply out of warranty you're screwed.
I'm amazed you thought this BGA Utopia (oxymoron) was a possibility still. I appreciate your optimism but time to get real.

 

And yet Louis Rossman and more exist to repair their products. More so than any other manufacturer in reality. He's fighting the good fight. One thing we'll have to keep an eye on is the "right to repair" bill as it'll set a large precedent, if only in USA.

BGA also isn't here just to make life harder. You need to get real about your reasoning as well. BGA has been around for a very long time and isn't going anywhere soon. It has it's pros and cons just as PGA and LGA do. It's almost universally accepted now that BGA's primary benefit is contact density and cheaper implementation cost.
Claiming BGA is some great evil, here to take your rights away, is perhaps more daft than people who buy Apple machines without knowing what they're getting into.

Lets be straight here, people on this forum have a problem with the COST of some BGA parts. Not BGA itself. If you could buy a whole replacement BGA motherboard for $50 nobody would care.
I don't hear anybody complaining that they can't replace a single failed memory chip on their DRAM because it's cheap to replace the whole stick. If we go into a DRAM apocalypse where prices jump 400% you can be damn sure people will suddenly complain that the memory chips aren't PGA too.

I'm just suggesting that this could trigger re-flow stations to be a more mainstream option as it allows the potential to replace much more than just cpus/gpus. I'm talking about memory chips, ASICs, PCH and all kinds of other controllers present on motherboard. Hell, even the actual socket on the motherboard is soldered on.

 

The "cost of BGA" is an easily misunderstood concept. As you say all manner of components are BGA soldered and have been since forever. When its a CPU AND GPU and maybe also RAM and (the only) flash storage, all things the computer consumer is used to buying separately to a motherboard, suddenly the replacement cost is through the roof. Meaning also that other perfectly good parts are thrown away because its uneconomical to replace the one broken part.

I had to try for days to find someone in a city of 5 million people who could do a socket replacement with a BGA solder station and the one I found is an hour away and is flat out overworked!

I just cringe when I think how much stuff has broken and been thrown away because of the switch to lead free solder. Newsflash, the african kids who process the waste shipped overseas to NIMBYstan by "e waste management professionals" are still dying of exposure to the toxic fumes from when they melt them all down for scrap metal......

 

Making consumer products more durable and easier to repair-www.europarl.europa.eu This should apply for soldered BGA filth like BGA Processors and graphics as well!! A small step in the right direction, thanks. Intel, Amd, Ngreedia + all ODM's out there should be punished hard for creating and selling soldered trash... We consumers must start making our Due Dilligence. We have to Stop buying garbage!! Even the European Parliament begins to see that the trash from the manufacturers has come too far. We need a Change. A big change!!

"The EU Commission, member states and producers should take measures to ensure consumers can enjoy durable, high-quality products that can be repaired and upgraded."

"77% of EU consumers would prefer to repair goods, rather than buy new ones"

 

This is why I think the EU is such a great thing!