So being the tech guy in my family, I just “inherited” my brother’s old laptop. It’s internals are reasonably modern, it has a Ryzen 5800HS and a RTX 3050Ti inside, the only issue is the display somehow died (I’ve opened the laptop up and I can’t tell how, but it definitely seems to be a hardware issue as far as I can tell - the laptop simply no longer detects the display is connected at all).
I’ve been able to confirm that full video output still works over HDMI (including access to the BIOS and boot menu, which I’ve heard isn’t a given with laptops) and that it can still boot with the battery removed as long as the stock 20v power supply is used (it won’t boot with only usb-c power)
So my question is, what would you do with this thing?
A bit of background on my current setup: I already have 2 mini PCs which I use for Docker containers (*arr stack, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Nextcloud and some other web services. All these run fine and storage is my bottleneck rather than power currently) and the other I use to run Home Assistant OS with a couple of relevant addons (or “apps” as they insist on calling them now)
I’d hate to have that 3050Ti sitting around unused, but I don’t really feel like I want or need a local AI server so I’d welcome any suggestions with interesting use cases for that GPU :)
it could be a loose connection or broken wires between the main board and the display panel. it might be worth the effort to open it up and examine those.
That was my first thought too, but I can’t really tell why, the display connector appears to be locked in place fine. It could just be a crappy design though because that cable runs through the heatsink, and the connector is partially blocked by one of the heat pipes so possibly thermal damage to the wire or connector?
Even just trying to re-seat the connector would require removing the entire heatsink/fan assembly which is very annoying. It’s not beyond my ability, but I asked the question about running it as a server to avoid that hassle lol, I’d much rather tinker with software than hardware it seems