9 ms·

How to repair the parts that explode in Lenovo yoga laptops

131 points by adammunich 7y ago

inflatableDodo 7y ago
>'If you are not careful you can rip the metal off the circuit board, and if that happens, there is very little you will be able to do to fix that.' I've done that before, managed to fix it with silver based conductive paint.
- asteli 7y ago
  One can also scrape the soldermask off of the nearest segment of the trace that got broken and jumper to it. It's easy to pull up traces on accident but it's uncommon for that trace adhesion failure to cause the nearest IC pin or via to fail as well.
  - adammunich 7y ago
    Much harder to do with buried vias :-)
numlock86 7y ago
Hug of death?
- adammunich 7y ago
  Hmm, I just rebooted the webserver and it seems fine now.
- williamchangnpu 7y ago
  Interesting, I learned a new word, apology for this irrelevant comment
mindslight 7y ago
> It is very likely that the reason the transistor failed was because of poor cooling, as it is a low cost, high-resistance transistor that is running near its design limits. This wouldn't be my first guess based on that hole, which was formed more abruptly than a little overheating. Cooling the outside of the package is only going to buy a little more margin, not fix the root problem. Looking at that schematic snippet, what is up with the capacitance on that gate drive circuit? They want a slower turn on to avoid a popping sound? Maybe it's a reference circuit that worked fine with a larger package or something, and a UF6 doesn't have enough thermal mass? If the turn on/off time is the problem, removing one of C489 or C530 could stop it from happening again. Or it could be something downstream drawing too much power on that rail or shorting it out. Since you're replacing the part, you might as well just use a FET with a lower resistance and some hope to address this possibility. FWIW some thinner flux (like a Kester 951) will generally let you fix solder bridges without starting all over.
- laydn 7y ago
  I've commented elsewhere on the thread, but, this also has the potential to be destroyed by software. That AUDIO_PWR_EN appears to be a signal that can be controlled by software. If you switch it fast enough such that the MOSFET is kept mostly in the linear region (due to the RC on the gate), you can kill the MOSFET very quickly.
- dfasdfasd 7y ago
  Yeah this looks like an SOA violation to me based on the hole. Usually you would turn a FET like that on slowly to avoid high inrush current into the downstream circuit, but ~10ms seems a bit silly. That would also explain why this escaped their initial testing because the FET wouldn't get hot in normal operation. Although, if it's a 5V0 or 3V3 rail they may just not be turning on the FET enough. It's Rds(on) is high at ~3 V, and they divide down the gate drive to get reasonably symmetric on/off times and slow speed.
- mng2 7y ago
  I'd be curious to see what shorting across the transistor would do. It would probably reveal whatever behavior they wanted to avoid.
- archi42 7y ago
  I basically came here to say the same, regarding the FET: Most likely there are parts with the same form factor but much lower resistance (both switching and fully on), which don't have that problem. The price-difference might matter in mass production, but for a repair at home, I don't see a reason to go with a cheap part. Decreasing the turn on/off time might also be a good idea to prevent future repairs (nice spot!).
lnsru 7y ago
It’s a typical thing in industrial design to conduct the heat to metal enclosure. I did this for transistors in a stepper motor driver and for FPGA designs. The cost of conductive sheet is close to zero compared to possible problems. Lenovo saved this 0,2 cent drop of thermal paste. Maybe it’s worth producing thousands of consumer devices, though I would like to buy properly designed products. Edit: thank you for explanation. This was not thermal problem then. I am just curious why didn’t all laptops had this problem?
- omgtehlion 7y ago
  I would refer you to comment by mindslight down here. It is just bad design by Lenovo. You should not put a switching transistor in linear mode. That rc-dampener is just bullshit.
- laydn 7y ago
  That circuit appears to assume that AUDIO_PWR_EN signal will switch very infrequently. If AUDIO_PWR_EN is a pin that is controlled by software, and, if you keep switching that pin such that the MOSFET is kept in the linear region due to the RC on the gate, that MOSFET will be toast very quickly.
  - rzzzt 7y ago
    This is intended to be a power saving feature; if enabled, audio detection will be driving the enable pin with a few seconds of hysteresis: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_audio_codec_power_saving http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_audio_codec_powe...
    - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
      Now the problem is, why would a MOSFET be destroyed even if there is a few seconds of hysteresis?! Well, defective driver is a still possibility, but perhaps it's a hardware problem.
rarecoil 7y ago
> It is very likely that the reason the transistor failed was because of poor cooling, as it is a low cost, high-resistance transistor that is running near its design limits. To prevent the problem from re-occuring, a soft / deformable silicone heat transfer pad can be applied to sink excess heat to the aluminum shell of the computer. In the 1990s, this was a very popular way to keep the motor controllers in CD-ROM drives cool without any additional hardware. So it seems like the problem is a cooling issue, which doesn't surprise me. "Ultrabooks" often seem to sacrifice decent cooling for the sake of thickness, and I think it is because most people really do not tax their hardware all that much. If you do - and you do not have a proper workstation-class laptop - you're likely to run into similar issues. My Thinkpad X280 suffers from poor cooling that quickly leads to throttling, even undervolted. My old work A485 wasn't that great, either.
- skavi 7y ago
  From the article, it seemed the issue was more just bad design. As the author demonstrated, adequate cooling could be achieved within the existing space constraints.
- dfasdfasd 7y ago
  It's not cooling. A switching transistor in that application shouldn't make too much heat. We don't know the voltage on the rail, so we can't say exactly what it is, but the likely candidates are an SOA violation because they're switching it absurdly slowly, or the gate drive is below a reasonable threshold.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  > So it seems like the problem is a cooling issue Not just a cooling issue. It's a MOSFET thermal runaway, as it is being driven to its limit, higher temperature => higher resistance => higher temperature. It can be stopped by cooling it, but the bigger picture is that it is either being driven improperly, or cheap, low power components are used to cut costs without adequate a safety margin.
  - rasz 7y ago
gmcitter 7y ago
Hug of death?
- adammunich 7y ago
  Curious to know where in the world you are, the server is working well for me on the west coast.
  - vovvov 7y ago
    Timing out for me in Denmark
    - adammunich 7y ago
      I just rebooted it again, working now, clearly we have a bug.
omgtehlion 7y ago
Something strikes me in the middle of the article. If you have metcal station (expensive pro stuff), clearly you have to have some experience with SMDs... This transistor is replaced with preheater and a hot air gun in seconds, and it is not the smallest package out there.
- adammunich 7y ago
  It's risky to use hot air spot-heating a high density multi layer PCB, as these boards aren't really designed for differential heating and can delaminate easily. You really should heat the whole board uniformly to be safe, but that is a danger to do when you aren't sure of the melting temperature of the solders used.
  - omgtehlion 7y ago
    You set preheater to 120c and hot air with smallest nozzle to 240c, works 100% like a charm
    - jve 7y ago
      Do you still need to apply flux before desoldering?
      - adammunich 7y ago
        You will need to apply it afterward to clean the pads.
      - omgtehlion 7y ago
        You need it while desoldering, while cleaning nopb solder (yes, you have to clean, or joint will crack later), and while soldering in the replacement. Flux is cheap, better use it all the time.
      - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
        "The bigger the glob, the better the job" is not the best practice when you're soldering components, but it's very true when you are reworking a SMD board...
huseinreds 7y ago
Refer to google
theon144 7y ago
Safe to say this is way out of technical capabilities of the average (power) user; but kudos for documenting the process nevertheless! Maybe someone in a local hackerspace would help out...
- adammunich 7y ago
  Sudo room in Oakland California!
theshrike79 7y ago
Now imagine these were Apple laptops that had their power circuitry randomly explode. The amount of angry tweetstorms, memes and class action lawsuits would break the internet.
- omgtehlion 7y ago
  Well, they do. Usually you go to the genius bar and get the whole board replaced for $800+
  - scrungus 7y ago
    this is just misleading and cherry-picking PC fanboying. the last time i went in to apple repair they charged me <$750 for a board repair because i got insurance but the warranty only just expired. its easy to hate on apple when you don't use facts or evidence
- askafriend 7y ago
  There is a massive double standard with Apple in the media and the general public. That's not to say Apple shouldn't be held to the highest standard. They 100% should be. They earned that responsibility. They are market leaders in every sense of the word. We should expect greatness from those who have and continue to achieve at a high level. However what isn't useful is a double standard. When a competing company like Samsung or Lenovo make extremely compromised decisions and put out poor products with poor support, poor quality, poor materials, and half baked ideas and sometimes all of these things at once - they almost always get a free pass (because who really cares or wants to talk about Lenovo laptops? That's obviously not going to get clicks from random grandpa and random teen). The problem with this is that it results in an extreme circle-jerk around one company for every little thing and on the other end of the spectrum - an extreme lack of accountability for other companies who should definitely have far more.
sydd 7y ago
Lenovos quality crap. We have around 10 Yoga 720s in our workplace, around 7 have their touchscreen/touchpad failed within a year. I'm out of options on what to buy if I don't want Apple.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  Well Apple is not that much better for a much higher price. The keyboard issue is still not fixed.
- gravelc 7y ago
  Very happy with my Dell Latitude. Has a few ports, keyboard is nice, build quality is great. Rock solid so far. One option at least.
- kart23 7y ago
  Thinkpads are usually pretty solid, and I like the (relative) repairability compared to MacBooks. But I agree there are plenty of issues with stupid stuff on modern Lenovo machines and their qc needs to get better to justify their prices.
- jve 7y ago
  I'm happy with my DELL XPS laptop.
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  Another recommendation: I've been happy so far with my newish LG Gram. There are some Linux-related issues on some models, but we've found workarounds for it and compatibility is pretty solid now.
  - LocalPCGuy 7y ago
    I've been looking at the Gram, the 17 looks like a pretty nice machine for a decent price, and going on sale regularly now with the newer i7s out. Worried about the quality though, and that it'll have similar problems to what the Lenovos and other ultralights seem to have.
EleriAvery 7y ago
This is the really amazing website, that provides the very informative information to the user & i have also find out a website that is also in the favor of the users is https://seersco.com https://seersco.com
joecool1029 7y ago
Insufficient cooling has given me issue with certain Lenovo thinkpads over the years. Most recently it was throttling on a X220, fixed by swapping to a redesigned fan/heatsink. The first time for me was with their T43. This model was mostly a platform refresh of the T42. There's a chip called a southbridge that's located below the palmrest. Between the models this chip went from 400mhz to 533mhz. Lenovo decided it wasn't important to improve the cooling, no heatsink whatsoever included on the southbridge. However, they kept ample temp sensors in the case so the fans would pulse nonstop as it failed to cool this one chip. I had two nicknames for that laptop. The 'nut roaster' and the 'vacuum cleaner'. I eventually fixed the problem by hammering out an old copper penny and sticking with thermal compound to bridge the gap between the heatsink and chip. It wasn't perfect but it dropped the temps like 10C. The rest could be controlled with an installed fan daemon.
- aljarry 7y ago
  I have similar problem with T420s from 2012 - great laptop, but there's a lot of coil whine and horrible fan with very small heatsink. It's a model without dedicated GPU, but i5 alone is enough to push the fan to constant medium-high speed and it's still 70-80°C running Windows 10 with Chrome. Repasting or cleaning the heatsink does not seem to help.
  - leni536 7y ago
    I have a T420s but with an optimus configuration. The dedicated GPU is pretty much useless because of thermal throttling and yes, even the i5 alone is often enough to go into throttling territory. This is after repasting and thorough cleaning of the fan assembly. And if you want to access the fan assembly then prepare taking apart the whole laptop.
  - aibara 7y ago
    Huh, interesting. I have two T420s laptops (i7s with dedicated GPUs), and have a friend with one too (i5 integrated). None of them has those issues, but we all run Ubuntu. One of mine did have fan issues once, but it was due to the fan itself going bad, and once replaced it was fine.
garganzol 7y ago
The damage of this mid-power MOSFET surprises me. Audio circuit is probably consumes just a few tens or hundreds milliamps at most. Yet it has a drastic crater-like dent in the IC enclosure. That tells me it was a voltage surge or current spike. The hypothesis of entering a linear region caused by a random software glitch producing an unconscious PWM on a filter slope sounds plausible as well. But that crater-like dent says that the real cause might be way more intensive than that.
zelon88 7y ago
Yikes! Placing alcohol and tools on the battery like that makes me nervous!
wpskidd 7y ago
Overheating (and the subsequent throttling) seems to be a growing problem for Intel. Also, most of their mobile line is locked to the UHD 620 GPU. As I understand it they are working off of an older fab than AMD and are hitting its EOL, all while commanding a price premium. AMD has room to expand their lead and appears to be beginning to, despite being a 10x smaller company.

131 points by adammunich 7y ago

>'If you are not careful you can rip the metal off the circuit board, and if that happens, there is very little you will be able to do to fix that.' I've done that before, managed to fix it with silver based conductive paint.

asteli 7y ago
One can also scrape the soldermask off of the nearest segment of the trace that got broken and jumper to it. It's easy to pull up traces on accident but it's uncommon for that trace adhesion failure to cause the nearest IC pin or via to fail as well.
- adammunich 7y ago
  Much harder to do with buried vias :-)

numlock86 7y ago

Hug of death?

adammunich 7y ago
Hmm, I just rebooted the webserver and it seems fine now.
williamchangnpu 7y ago
Interesting, I learned a new word, apology for this irrelevant comment

mindslight 7y ago

> It is very likely that the reason the transistor failed was because of poor cooling, as it is a low cost, high-resistance transistor that is running near its design limits. This wouldn't be my first guess based on that hole, which was formed more abruptly than a little overheating. Cooling the outside of the package is only going to buy a little more margin, not fix the root problem. Looking at that schematic snippet, what is up with the capacitance on that gate drive circuit? They want a slower turn on to avoid a popping sound? Maybe it's a reference circuit that worked fine with a larger package or something, and a UF6 doesn't have enough thermal mass? If the turn on/off time is the problem, removing one of C489 or C530 could stop it from happening again. Or it could be something downstream drawing too much power on that rail or shorting it out. Since you're replacing the part, you might as well just use a FET with a lower resistance and some hope to address this possibility. FWIW some thinner flux (like a Kester 951) will generally let you fix solder bridges without starting all over.

laydn 7y ago
I've commented elsewhere on the thread, but, this also has the potential to be destroyed by software. That AUDIO_PWR_EN appears to be a signal that can be controlled by software. If you switch it fast enough such that the MOSFET is kept mostly in the linear region (due to the RC on the gate), you can kill the MOSFET very quickly.
dfasdfasd 7y ago
Yeah this looks like an SOA violation to me based on the hole. Usually you would turn a FET like that on slowly to avoid high inrush current into the downstream circuit, but ~10ms seems a bit silly. That would also explain why this escaped their initial testing because the FET wouldn't get hot in normal operation. Although, if it's a 5V0 or 3V3 rail they may just not be turning on the FET enough. It's Rds(on) is high at ~3 V, and they divide down the gate drive to get reasonably symmetric on/off times and slow speed.
mng2 7y ago
I'd be curious to see what shorting across the transistor would do. It would probably reveal whatever behavior they wanted to avoid.
archi42 7y ago
I basically came here to say the same, regarding the FET: Most likely there are parts with the same form factor but much lower resistance (both switching and fully on), which don't have that problem. The price-difference might matter in mass production, but for a repair at home, I don't see a reason to go with a cheap part. Decreasing the turn on/off time might also be a good idea to prevent future repairs (nice spot!).

lnsru 7y ago

It’s a typical thing in industrial design to conduct the heat to metal enclosure. I did this for transistors in a stepper motor driver and for FPGA designs. The cost of conductive sheet is close to zero compared to possible problems. Lenovo saved this 0,2 cent drop of thermal paste. Maybe it’s worth producing thousands of consumer devices, though I would like to buy properly designed products. Edit: thank you for explanation. This was not thermal problem then. I am just curious why didn’t all laptops had this problem?

omgtehlion 7y ago
I would refer you to comment by mindslight down here. It is just bad design by Lenovo. You should not put a switching transistor in linear mode. That rc-dampener is just bullshit.
laydn 7y ago
That circuit appears to assume that AUDIO_PWR_EN signal will switch very infrequently. If AUDIO_PWR_EN is a pin that is controlled by software, and, if you keep switching that pin such that the MOSFET is kept in the linear region due to the RC on the gate, that MOSFET will be toast very quickly.
- rzzzt 7y ago
  This is intended to be a power saving feature; if enabled, audio detection will be driving the enable pin with a few seconds of hysteresis: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_audio_codec_power_saving http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_audio_codec_powe...
  - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
    Now the problem is, why would a MOSFET be destroyed even if there is a few seconds of hysteresis?! Well, defective driver is a still possibility, but perhaps it's a hardware problem.

rarecoil 7y ago

> It is very likely that the reason the transistor failed was because of poor cooling, as it is a low cost, high-resistance transistor that is running near its design limits. To prevent the problem from re-occuring, a soft / deformable silicone heat transfer pad can be applied to sink excess heat to the aluminum shell of the computer. In the 1990s, this was a very popular way to keep the motor controllers in CD-ROM drives cool without any additional hardware. So it seems like the problem is a cooling issue, which doesn't surprise me. "Ultrabooks" often seem to sacrifice decent cooling for the sake of thickness, and I think it is because most people really do not tax their hardware all that much. If you do - and you do not have a proper workstation-class laptop - you're likely to run into similar issues. My Thinkpad X280 suffers from poor cooling that quickly leads to throttling, even undervolted. My old work A485 wasn't that great, either.

skavi 7y ago
From the article, it seemed the issue was more just bad design. As the author demonstrated, adequate cooling could be achieved within the existing space constraints.
dfasdfasd 7y ago
It's not cooling. A switching transistor in that application shouldn't make too much heat. We don't know the voltage on the rail, so we can't say exactly what it is, but the likely candidates are an SOA violation because they're switching it absurdly slowly, or the gate drive is below a reasonable threshold.
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
> So it seems like the problem is a cooling issue Not just a cooling issue. It's a MOSFET thermal runaway, as it is being driven to its limit, higher temperature => higher resistance => higher temperature. It can be stopped by cooling it, but the bigger picture is that it is either being driven improperly, or cheap, low power components are used to cut costs without adequate a safety margin.
- rasz 7y ago

gmcitter 7y ago

Hug of death?

adammunich 7y ago
Curious to know where in the world you are, the server is working well for me on the west coast.
- vovvov 7y ago
  Timing out for me in Denmark
  - adammunich 7y ago
    I just rebooted it again, working now, clearly we have a bug.

omgtehlion 7y ago

Something strikes me in the middle of the article. If you have metcal station (expensive pro stuff), clearly you have to have some experience with SMDs... This transistor is replaced with preheater and a hot air gun in seconds, and it is not the smallest package out there.

adammunich 7y ago
It's risky to use hot air spot-heating a high density multi layer PCB, as these boards aren't really designed for differential heating and can delaminate easily. You really should heat the whole board uniformly to be safe, but that is a danger to do when you aren't sure of the melting temperature of the solders used.
- omgtehlion 7y ago
  You set preheater to 120c and hot air with smallest nozzle to 240c, works 100% like a charm
  - jve 7y ago
    Do you still need to apply flux before desoldering?
    - adammunich 7y ago
      You will need to apply it afterward to clean the pads.
    - omgtehlion 7y ago
      You need it while desoldering, while cleaning nopb solder (yes, you have to clean, or joint will crack later), and while soldering in the replacement. Flux is cheap, better use it all the time.
    - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
      "The bigger the glob, the better the job" is not the best practice when you're soldering components, but it's very true when you are reworking a SMD board...

huseinreds 7y ago

Refer to google

theon144 7y ago

Safe to say this is way out of technical capabilities of the average (power) user; but kudos for documenting the process nevertheless! Maybe someone in a local hackerspace would help out...

adammunich 7y ago
Sudo room in Oakland California!

theshrike79 7y ago

Now imagine these were Apple laptops that had their power circuitry randomly explode. The amount of angry tweetstorms, memes and class action lawsuits would break the internet.

omgtehlion 7y ago
Well, they do. Usually you go to the genius bar and get the whole board replaced for $800+
- scrungus 7y ago
  this is just misleading and cherry-picking PC fanboying. the last time i went in to apple repair they charged me <$750 for a board repair because i got insurance but the warranty only just expired. its easy to hate on apple when you don't use facts or evidence
askafriend 7y ago
There is a massive double standard with Apple in the media and the general public. That's not to say Apple shouldn't be held to the highest standard. They 100% should be. They earned that responsibility. They are market leaders in every sense of the word. We should expect greatness from those who have and continue to achieve at a high level. However what isn't useful is a double standard. When a competing company like Samsung or Lenovo make extremely compromised decisions and put out poor products with poor support, poor quality, poor materials, and half baked ideas and sometimes all of these things at once - they almost always get a free pass (because who really cares or wants to talk about Lenovo laptops? That's obviously not going to get clicks from random grandpa and random teen). The problem with this is that it results in an extreme circle-jerk around one company for every little thing and on the other end of the spectrum - an extreme lack of accountability for other companies who should definitely have far more.

sydd 7y ago

Lenovos quality crap. We have around 10 Yoga 720s in our workplace, around 7 have their touchscreen/touchpad failed within a year. I'm out of options on what to buy if I don't want Apple.

StreamBright 7y ago
Well Apple is not that much better for a much higher price. The keyboard issue is still not fixed.
gravelc 7y ago
Very happy with my Dell Latitude. Has a few ports, keyboard is nice, build quality is great. Rock solid so far. One option at least.
kart23 7y ago
Thinkpads are usually pretty solid, and I like the (relative) repairability compared to MacBooks. But I agree there are plenty of issues with stupid stuff on modern Lenovo machines and their qc needs to get better to justify their prices.
jve 7y ago
I'm happy with my DELL XPS laptop.
thaumaturgy 7y ago
Another recommendation: I've been happy so far with my newish LG Gram. There are some Linux-related issues on some models, but we've found workarounds for it and compatibility is pretty solid now.
- LocalPCGuy 7y ago
  I've been looking at the Gram, the 17 looks like a pretty nice machine for a decent price, and going on sale regularly now with the newer i7s out. Worried about the quality though, and that it'll have similar problems to what the Lenovos and other ultralights seem to have.

EleriAvery 7y ago

This is the really amazing website, that provides the very informative information to the user & i have also find out a website that is also in the favor of the users is https://seersco.com https://seersco.com

joecool1029 7y ago

Insufficient cooling has given me issue with certain Lenovo thinkpads over the years. Most recently it was throttling on a X220, fixed by swapping to a redesigned fan/heatsink. The first time for me was with their T43. This model was mostly a platform refresh of the T42. There's a chip called a southbridge that's located below the palmrest. Between the models this chip went from 400mhz to 533mhz. Lenovo decided it wasn't important to improve the cooling, no heatsink whatsoever included on the southbridge. However, they kept ample temp sensors in the case so the fans would pulse nonstop as it failed to cool this one chip. I had two nicknames for that laptop. The 'nut roaster' and the 'vacuum cleaner'. I eventually fixed the problem by hammering out an old copper penny and sticking with thermal compound to bridge the gap between the heatsink and chip. It wasn't perfect but it dropped the temps like 10C. The rest could be controlled with an installed fan daemon.

aljarry 7y ago
I have similar problem with T420s from 2012 - great laptop, but there's a lot of coil whine and horrible fan with very small heatsink. It's a model without dedicated GPU, but i5 alone is enough to push the fan to constant medium-high speed and it's still 70-80°C running Windows 10 with Chrome. Repasting or cleaning the heatsink does not seem to help.
- leni536 7y ago
  I have a T420s but with an optimus configuration. The dedicated GPU is pretty much useless because of thermal throttling and yes, even the i5 alone is often enough to go into throttling territory. This is after repasting and thorough cleaning of the fan assembly. And if you want to access the fan assembly then prepare taking apart the whole laptop.
- aibara 7y ago
  Huh, interesting. I have two T420s laptops (i7s with dedicated GPUs), and have a friend with one too (i5 integrated). None of them has those issues, but we all run Ubuntu. One of mine did have fan issues once, but it was due to the fan itself going bad, and once replaced it was fine.

garganzol 7y ago

The damage of this mid-power MOSFET surprises me. Audio circuit is probably consumes just a few tens or hundreds milliamps at most. Yet it has a drastic crater-like dent in the IC enclosure. That tells me it was a voltage surge or current spike. The hypothesis of entering a linear region caused by a random software glitch producing an unconscious PWM on a filter slope sounds plausible as well. But that crater-like dent says that the real cause might be way more intensive than that.

zelon88 7y ago

Yikes! Placing alcohol and tools on the battery like that makes me nervous!

wpskidd 7y ago

Overheating (and the subsequent throttling) seems to be a growing problem for Intel. Also, most of their mobile line is locked to the UHD 620 GPU. As I understand it they are working off of an older fab than AMD and are hitting its EOL, all while commanding a price premium. AMD has room to expand their lead and appears to be beginning to, despite being a 10x smaller company.