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The 1 GB ATI/AMD dedicated graphics card of my Dell Inspiron N5010 laptop failed recently and I got it repaired from a local laptop service center as the laptop is out of warranty. The service man told me that he has replaced the graphics card with a newer one. But I want to be sure about it as he has taken a lot of bucks from me. I suspect he has done some 'REFLOW' mechanism to recover the graphics card.

How to check in Ubuntu / Windows if the graphics card is brand new?

I tried all commands like - lspci, lshw etc. The output is same as it was before the card was damaged.

Karan
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  • You can't replace the graphics card on that machine as it's soldered in. The only way to replace it is to actually replace the motherboard. So yeah, most likely a "reflow soldering"... – don_crissti Dec 28 '15 at 18:27
  • Not quite, I've recently done a "reflow", but that was a GPU that was modular from the motherboard, doing that switching between Intel "onboard" and the discreet GPU as it needs more GPU power or less power. – Hvisage Jan 24 '16 at 21:03

2 Answers2

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Fundamental issue... do you know the serial number of the 'original' graphics card? If you didn't record that info then what are you going to compare against?

Also checking ebay, no-one is selling graphics cards for the N5010 but people are selling mobos with tested graphics... implies that the graphics is built into the mainboard. If your shop really replaced the graphics 'card' then they must have done board-level replacement of components... probably not worth it given spare mobos are on the market from $90. As there is no 'graphics card' per se, I'd guess your shop is not being quite honest about what they did.

houi
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You'll need to get the GPU's serial number(s) and compare that.

However, unless Dell have a tool for interogating the GPU's serial number, (you might be lucky when checking the BIOS/UEFI for information somewhere), the only way would be to physically check the serial number stickers :(

Hvisage
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