Hi everyone.

I'm working on my brother's HP Omen 15 laptop.

The short story:

It is suspected that the lithium-ion battery was faulty and shorted, burning a component on the board the moment that he plugged in his laptop charger.

The motherboard model is GPC54 LA-J662P Rev 1.0

The upper portion of the bad chip is burned away, but I can make out the letters 'BTXCIA'. It has 5 pins that I can see.

I'm not sure what kind of IC this is... and I haven't found any information online yet.

If anyone can help me identify this chip or give me a clue that will lead me toward identifying it, I'll be really grateful. Thank you in advance.

I've attached pictures of the board and the burnt component.

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Long Story:

Two days ago, my brother pushed his HDMI port too hard when he was trying to get the HDMI chord to play nicely. He heard and felt the board inside shift slightly. Shortly thereafter, he experienced thermal throttling (checked in HWinfo64) and PC shutdowns after 3 minutes of usage. I suspected that he pushed too hard and that the pressure distributed unevenly inside, causing the old thermal paste to crack apart.

I took off the rear laptop case, removed his battery, removed his SSD, removed the fan connectors, unscrewed the fans and heat pipe assembly, and removed the heat pipe assembly and fans to get a clearer look. The thermal paste was indeed old (and rather insufficient in quantity).

I was not able to verify whether the thermal paste had cracked ahead of time as I had thought since removing the heat pipe assembly would pull on the thermal paste and break it as well. However, I cleaned off the old thermal paste with 99% isopropyl alcohol and wiped it with alcohol wipes (isopropyl 97% wipes) until the surfaces of the exposed CPU and GPU, as well as that of the copper heatsink, were shiny and smooth.

I applied thermal paste (Noctua brand) using a medium (an M&M-sized) dab of paste in the center of the CPU and a medium dab of paste in the center of the GPU with an additional 4 small dots of thermal paste in each of the GPU's corners. I then used a plastic applicator to smear the paste as evenly as I could on the CPU and GPU.

I carefully reassembled the laptop and booted it up. Everything worked well. It passed a couple of stress tests, including User Benchmark (with decent scores- battleship for gaming, nuclear submarine for desktop, and aircraft carrier for workstation). HWinfo confirmed that temps were down again. The temperature had been 85 - 90 degrees C on the CPU cores before I started repairs and dropped to 40 - 60 degrees C after the repairs. The GPU sat comfortably at 50 degrees C after repairs, but it had been 75 C prior to repairs.

I was satisfied that we had fixed it. Unfortunately, we booted it up the next day and after only about 3 minutes of use it crashed again. This time it would not power on.

I set out to troubleshoot once again. I removed the back cover as before but I had to use the restroom. While I was away, my brother plugged in the power cable and said that he saw smoke. We removed the battery, all the ribbons, the heat pipe assembly, and the motherboard. I tested his SSD in my laptop and it still worked fine. He had no data loss (luckily). After removing his motherboard and inspecting it carefully, I noticed a burned-out component on the back side of the motherboard. It appears that it burst and then melted, plastic, solder and all onto the motherboard. Fortunately, after looking at some product photos online, I found that there was no component where the plastic mess was now melted. (I was worried that the silk screen was burned and that there was supposed to be some component in the area that would be nigh impossible to solder back).

I have a hunch that if I can order a replacement for the burnt component (ending in 'BTXCIA'), I can replace it and get the board to work.