My dad has a Beelink GTR7 that is the one of the first ones. He spent something like 2 years fiddling with it, trying to get it to be stable. Back and forth with Beelink. It has a defective mobo from what I remember him telling me. I’ve forgotten the whole story. Basically he is mad at it and it is an expensive brick sitting in his closet.
I asked if I could play around with it and he said sure. Now I am trying to figure out what I want to try to do with it. I’ve somewhat become a repository for his e-waste. He dropped his Ryzen 1700 computer off when he got a new one and it sat in the closet for a few months until I hooked it up to a capture card for my 10 yo youtube channel.
Anyways, on to the computer. Not sure what I want to do with an unstable computer. I’ll through a new m.2 and update all the firmware, but then what? I have a server already. I have a decent desktop already.
Maybe replace the tower doing the capture for my kid’s youtube? Seems like a waste and a good way to get some anger at it crashing in the middle of a recording.
I was thinking or reripping my movie library. I’ve learned a lot since I started. It could sit there crunching away.
Always, open to suggestions on what to do with an untrustworthy computer.
Define that a bit better. One thing you can do is disassembling the machine into it’s constituent parts, re-paste what you can, reseat cards, RAM sticks and everything else that can be taken apart, test with 1 RAM stick in various slots, systematically expanding if and when those sticks work and perhaps give the unit more power budget (bigger power brick).
I am planning on that. My dad spent a lot of time fiddling with it too. RAM, SSDs, new bottom plan and cooling fan. My understanding is that AMD made an error in their reference design which effected a percentage of everyone who had one of these APUs early on, not just Beelink. I think he drug his feet trying to “fix it” himself instead of shipping it back for so long, the warranty window had passes. I think they were going to charge him for shipping which also pissed him off. I will document everything he tried.
Maybe if Beelink will fix it still, I’ll ship it back to China for repair and hopefully give it to him for Christmas. I know he really wanted to make it work and like it.
@wendell Is there a guide or something you followed for what needed to be reflowed. I have fixed a few PS3s but not sure on my skill here. If I could get it working and give it back to my dad for Christmas, that would be great.
we used a toaster oven that has a micro to follow a preset pre-heat/heating profile. we took everything off the board and added a couple drops of high heat epoxy to the opposite side of the board ‘heavy’ components to stop them from potentially falling off
For lack of an (expensive) re-flow oven, you can get good results with a hot-air gun. Mind, not a hairdryer! Same principle, true, but certainly not the same heat capacity Still not a cheap piece of kit, but very much better affordable then the oven
If you are in the US, sending it to Wendell for a re-flow treatment is probably your best option.
That’s pretty much how I fixed the PS3s. I just realized I don’t have a toaster oven anymore. Just the big one.
What is it that you are targeting in the reflow? I thought the big issues was AMD made a mistake in the reference design.
I will also see what Beelink says about service for the unit which is out of warranty. I wonder if I could get them to ship me a rev2 (or whatever they got to) board and then ask someone like dosdude to move the APU.
I have a friend that does this kind of stuff a lot more than I do; they’ve replaced some AM5 sockets for me and that kind of thing. The toaster ovens we made had 4-5 presets on them. They really struggle with the modern lead-free solder, though. Its a little preset program that does it (and there’s a sensor or two iirc).
My dad dropped it off on Thursday.
-Fresh-ish install of Windows (had a windows 10 drive sitting around so I installed that and then upgraded to 11).
-I found that Beelink has a v39 BIOS which came out this summer. I updated from v38 to v39. It never told me it finished; however, it is reporting that it updated.
-I turned off hibernation.
-Ran 2 hours and then 6 hours of AIDA64 CPU and GPU. Running CPU alone right now. Will do GPU afterwards.
-Did some web surfing.
I haven’t had it crash on me yet. My dad said it would crash 4-6 times a day. It was quite annoying when he was in the middle of an AutoCAD project.
I was thinking of writing a python script that would randomly open and close things to try to simulate use. Open to other suggestions.
I also need to start reencoding my media library now that I have learned a lot since I started. I might get some ISOs ripped and have it start encoding.
Only quirk so car is that I can’t seem to get any of the USB-C ports to communicate. I tried my laptop dock and my USB switcher and neither worked.
Thanks. I think it has the SSD in it it was shipped with. My dad tried using a different NVME drive (along with 30 other things beelink asked him to try). That one is in his current computer and doing fine. It had issues in this computer though.
I will look an see if I have another 2280 in my box and drop it in the other slot. Maybe install windows on that one and boot off of it. I will double check but I think he had Windows and Linux desktops installed for dual boot. I need to double check on that.
He said it would do it randomly. Not seemingly tied to any process. Working in cad, checking email, researching how to build a carbon fiber sailboat.
Still not a cheap piece of kit, but very much better affordable then the oven 
