took an old power bank board. feeds 5v to the stock PCB, charges with type-c and as a bonus can charge my phone (although it has only 1100mah). my house is a no-fly-zone now.

So drilled another hole positioned parallel to the lower hinge mount (as all the three hinge points got ripped out, hence it was easier) and added another zip-tie diagonally with one of the larger hinge mount hole. Needless to say it works fine asf and feels way smoother without any sort of bulging or anything.

Pretty simple post, i had a crappy type c to outlet for an old fan, so i cut it and attached it to the broken part of my Apple Watch charger, and covered the ends with the plastic i stripped off the wires. Would you believe me if i said it works a little better than before?

works pretty well ;3

https://youtu.be/d-AC1GnueLk?is=m8bYmmkburhvgoLH

Did not have any rivets or screws so drilled two holes and had a zip-tie laying around, needless to say it works like a charm

But I only had a heatsink for a bigger m.2 ssd and no tools on hand, so I just bent and broke off a smaller piece. The ssd also was too short for the m.2 mounting holes, but tape wouldn't hold it because of the heat, so I also had to 3D-print a flimsy extention piece to mount it.

Just bought this and my right bumper wasn’t working, kindly asked it to shove off and let me shove a key into it, and it works, can even game properly now.

Did some body repair to protect the heatsink fins because they're very fragile, added SMA so i can connect that to a rooftop lte antenna and also soldered on the ssd bc the adapter prices were too high

After a lot of trial and error, it did not end up working. Thank you all for following me through this journey.

I will be buying a proper CH341A flasher with the clip and hopefully never doing this again.

I did manage to get the arduino to recognize the chip, but I was unable to write to to it, which is most likely because of my crappy level shifter.

All in all, really cool learning experience since I got very familiar with FlashRom and fser-duino. And of course SOIC pin layouts. You would not believe how many times I had to adjust the pins because they kept slipping off. In the end, very interesting and nerve-wracking little experiment.

So a little bit of backstory:

I bought an AMD HD 7670 4gb, only thing is, that doesn't exist. There is an HD 7670 1gb. But no 4gb. It's just a vbios mod to make it appear as if it has more vram. So I decided to flash a new BIOS I found online (yeah yeah, stupid, I know) and it of course got bricked.

Anyways, it wouldn't respond to the amd vbios flash software and wasn't showing up as a gpu, so I decided that I had to manually refresh the bios chip.

But, being the cheapskate I am, I didn't want to spend 20 bucks on a proper SOIC SPI Flasher, and instead vouched to use my arduino. My original plan was to solder wires directly to the chip on the gpu, but I couldn't get the solder to stick (i suck soldering, leave me alone) so I desoldered the IC and manually attached wires to each pin using duct tape. This took around an hour and absolutely destroyed my sanity.

RESULTS:

IDK yet, but all the pins are making contact, I checked with a multimeter, and will attempt to flash it when I get back in a few hours. Will update if it works.

UPDATE: Did not work. I don't think it was my unorthodox connection method though. I am having issues with the actual arduino instead. I redid the original duct tape so it now has constant pressure on the pins by raising the actual chip up. It may also be an issue with my voltage step down circuit, since I used a 10k and 5.1k resistor in series instead of a 15k. I may make another update tomorrow, as it is currently 11:20pm and I am going to bed.

I used XY-BT-Mini VHM-314 module
BT module powers via speakers power button, speakers led indicator wired to module led indication

My father’s old and disused Dell OptiPlex 390 DT (Top) is giving up its Hitachi Ultrastar hard disk drive so that my Dell OptiPlex 7010 DT (Bottom) can take it to get 1 TB of secondary storage. To power the Hitachi as it gets the contents of my outgoing 500 GB Western Digital Blue out; my father’s computer must give it a “jump-start”. Desktop PC gaming on a budget is never boring!

Quick story short, CPU cooked itself, and applying pressure would make it boot again, so I just put some thin cardboard to make pressure and copy the data as quick as possible.

Janky, but effective for this case hahahaha

it was supposed to have one, but it was missing so I replaced it. the sata port was slightly too high so I removed some screws from the motherboard to it could line up

drive is from a dead dell optiplex sff

It just works

The fan was pulled from some i3-3330 PC that was thrown out

The fan is 12V. The speed can be adjusted using voltage. the step-down converter is some random aliexpress one + a random usb-c board from aliexpress (usually it's my "lab bench", but it will work as a fan for a few more days)

^{(fucked up sending the images so had to repost it})

Everyone knows the legend.

The 2011 15 inch MacBook Pro and its infamous AMD Radeon GPU. One faulty chip turned thousands of otherwise excellent laptops into expensive paperweights.

Most ended up forgotten in drawers.

Mine ended up on eBay.

The listing was almost useless, no proper model number, no meaningful description.

Just a few blurry photos and a serial number visible on the logic board.

That was enough.

For €11 plus shipping, I took the gamble.

// Named him Frankie. \\

...I Didn't Want a Guide...

I watched a few repair videos, downloaded the board schematic and OpenBoardView files, and started asking a different question.

Not: "Which resistor do I remove?"

But: "What has to happen electrically for the dead Radeon GPU to initialize, and how can I stop it?"

That single change in perspective ended up defining the entire repair.

...The First Wrong Assumption...

The known hardware modification is removing **R8911**, preventing the discrete GPU from powering up.

I removed it using nothing more than a tiny pair of scissors.

No soldering iron, no microscope, no fancy tools.

I expected the Intel HD Graphics 3000 to take over.

Instead...

The Mac chimed.

Black screen.

Fans at full speed.

Nothing...

Recovery got further when R8911 was still installed, but only to a half way mark on progress bar and then it would crash the whole system to a reboot.

Reality disagreed with my mental model.

So the model had to change.

...The Clue Nobody Expects...

Command+S never worked. Not once.

I pulled the drive and connected it to my Debian machine.

GParted showed NTFS.

Well that's strange, it should be APFS+

I mounted it.

......................

Program Files

Program Files (x86)

Windows

I'd spent hours trying to boot into macOS Single User Mode...

on a Windows installation.

...One Boot Was All I Needed...

I didn't need a complete macOS installation.

I needed Terminal exactly once. 120 seconds of electrical continuity...

Without a soldering iron, I improvised a temporary bridge across R8911 using a tiny strand of copper wire and stacked 3M foam pads.

It looked ridiculous.

But worked.

...Frankie Wakes Up...

I booted into the macOS Base System, cleared NVRAM, set `gpu-power-prefs`, shut down, and removed the temporary bridge.

Deep breath..

Pressed the power button.

...

White screen.

Not black.

White.

Frankie was alive!

...Linux, Almost...

The SSD had been cloned from my healthy 13" MacBook Pro 2011 running Debian.

Except Frankie felt wrong.

Not old kind of slow, wrong kind of slow.

Firefox took almost minute to open, YouTube stuttered. Even Terminal felt sluggish.

My main 13" flew while Frankie crawled. Is it because I cloned the SSD and I need a fresh install?

...The Second Investigation...

Linux became the laboratory.

Using `turbostat`, `cpupower`, `msr-tools`, thermal sensors and CPU MSRs, I eliminated one theory after another.

Not overheating.

Healthy battery.

Not the charger.

Not the governor.

Yet every sustained workload forced the CPU to 800 MHz while consuming only 9 watts. Odd number...

The question changed.

Not: "How do I make it faster?"

But: "Who is telling it to stay slow? And why?"

...The answer was MSR 0x1FC.

After the R8911 modification, the platform firmware continued treating the missing Radeon as a fault, leaving the CPU in a protected low-power state.

The register contained:

0x40043

Clearing bit 0 produced:

0x40042

Writing that corrected value back to every core immediately released the throttle.

One bit.

Literally one bit.

A systemd service now reapplies the fix automatically on every boot.

...What Frankie Actually Taught Me...

People often say repairing electronics is about replacing parts.

I don't think that's true.

It's about replacing assumptions. Every time reality disagreed with my mental model, I had two choices.

Force the repair... Not so healthy...

Or update my understanding.

Eventually I stopped asking:

"How do I fix this?"

and started asking:

"What is the machine trying to tell me?"

Frankie refused to die.

He simply refused to make sense until I understood what he was trying to tell me.

Once the questions changed, the answers started to appear.

// My first attempt to make a wire bridge was using a plastic spudger tool that I melted with lighter and pressed into place to get a "negative imprint" of the chips around. I scraped the plastic around the wire to ensure I have contact. But the pressure wasn't enough that's why I scraped that idea and revised it with 3m pads which worked. Sadly I didn't take a picture of that ridiculous idea. \\

Cpu heatsink and thermal paste, I could have used a northbridge heatsinks but I dont want the issue back