I’m looking to get into electronics repair and soldering as a hobby. I’m already an electrician, and I’d like to expand my skills into PCB repair and small electronic devices. I’m particularly interested in repairing things like keyboards, controllers, headphones, and other everyday electronics.

I would really appreciate your advice on the essential tools, equipment, and materials I should invest to get started, and the mandatory ones that I can't not have.

Thanks in advance for your help and sorry for bad grammar i'm french native.

I have an ASUS TUF Gaming A15 FA507NV-LP023W with an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU.

The laptop originally booted normally, but I was troubleshooting an NVIDIA GPU issue under Linux. The RTX 4060 was detected by the system, but the NVIDIA driver was unable to initialise it correctly and nvidia-smi would fail/hang. Kernel logs showed NVIDIA/ACPI-related hangs involving rm_acpi_nvpcf_notify and nv_acpi_nvpcf_event.

I updated the laptop BIOS successfully from version 316 to version 318. The laptop continued to boot afterward.

During further troubleshooting, I changed the BIOS Display Mode from Dynamic to dGPU Only. After saving that setting, the laptop stopped producing any display. The laptop screen remains black, HDMI also gives no signal, and the keyboard lights/fans come on and cycle, and laptop keeps powering on and off.

I was unable to get back into BIOS to restore Dynamic mode. EC reset and ASUS BIOS recovery methods were also attempted but nothing changed.

I then took the laptop to an ASUS authorised service centre. They tested it with a known-good replacement mainboard and confirmed that the laptop operates with the replacement board. They therefore diagnosed the original mainboard as faulty and quoted RM4,115 (approximately £750) to replace the entire board :`(

ASUS does not perform component-level board repair, so I declined the motherboard replacement.

I would appreciate any opinions:

1. Does this sound potentially repairable at component level rather than requiring complete mainboard replacement?
2. Could the current no-display condition be caused by BIOS/EC/NVRAM configuration or firmware that could be externally reprogrammed?
3. Given that the NVIDIA GPU initialization problem existed before the no-display issue, what areas of the board would be worth investigating?
4. Does this sound like a board worth repairing at component-level?, and what sort of repair cost would generally be reasonable ?

I attached a screenshot of the questions I asked the ASUS diagnostic team and there replies.

Thank you.

In my case, the laptop initially still booted normally, but the NVIDIA GPU was detected without properly initializing. While troubleshooting, I changed the BIOS display mode from Dynamic to dGPU Only. After that, the laptop stopped producing any display at all. The keyboard and fans come on, but I can't access the BIOS and I get no signal from either the internal screen or an external monitor.

I took it to an ASUS authorised service centre. They tested the laptop with another known-good mainboard and said it worked, so they diagnosed my original mainboard as faulty and quoted me for a complete mainboard replacement. The price is far too high, so I'm now looking into component-level motherboard repair instead.

Your situation sounds a little less severe than mine since your laptop was still usable on the iGPU, but the combination of the dedicated GPU and several other motherboard devices suddenly failing sounded similar enough that I wanted to ask.

Did you ever find out exactly what was wrong with your motherboard? Were you able to repair it, and if so, what was actually repaired or replaced and roughly how much did it cost?

I'd really appreciate an update on what eventually happened with yours, even if you ended up not repairing it.

Thanks!

PS4 games run for hours with zero issues. PS5 games crash after 45–70 mins on cold boot, or within 3–5 mins on a warm restart. Symptom: black screen $\to$ white LED on + fan spinning for 5–10s $\to$ shuts down completely. 1st power button press gives 1 beep, 2nd press boots with 3 beeps.

Confirmed measurements:

• 12V rail under load stays rock solid at 12.06–12.08V right until crash.
• Resistances: VDD_GFX 2.0Ω, VDD_SOC 4.1Ω, GDDR6 1.35V 21.5Ω, MISC 9.6Ω.
• Syscon UART telemetry: TSoCTSoC​ is 51–77 °C at crash time (TENVTENV​ 27–35 °C).
• Syscon errors: always starts with B0088108 (Sonics Bus Error), then exactly 3–4 seconds later 808B0000 / 808B00FF (SSD Watchdog Timeout) and 80830019.

Anyone seen this specific sequence on EDM-040 / EDM-052?

I have had this switch lite for a long time, but then one time I dropped it into water and it got water damage. we went to many stores and we put it in rice and we did everything but everybody said it was unfixable, but I’ve heard very good things about your store and I thought maybe you could fix it. :D (p.s. I would obviously prefer the data could be retrieved, but if not, that is fine. It has been a year since the accident)