A1226 / A1260 GPU worth repairing?

[gevans91]

Im new to all this board/component level repair, been watching a lot of Louis' videos on youtube and feel confident enough to start trying it for myself, struggling to find old donor machines to work on though!

I have managed to get my hands on 2 Macbook Pro's 1x A1226 and 1x A1260, I have not collected them yet but the description for them is just "dead", you plug in the magsafe and nothing happens. Now I am familiar with the GPU failure rates on these machines, would you recommend these machines as good machines to start board repairs (if it is gpu failure) or am i better hunting for something else, and where is a good place to look? Ebay is probably not the best place as 90% of listings the machine has probably already been opened and tampered with?

Thanks guys!

 

[dukefawks]

They will probably power on once you use a REAL 85W charger. The GPUs for these are easy to get but I really see no reason to fix this old crap anymore. Do you have any experience with replacing BGAs and equipment?

 

[gevans91]

Was thinking of fixing them more for the practice on some older hardware before attempting more expensive stuff, I can pick up the complete machines for $20 each since he was going to be trashing them anyway. Could probably re-sell them for a bit more than that if I get them working

Not a lot of BGA experience but have done a few micro usb / hdmi ports. Should be able to learn BGA replacement without a lot of difficulty, I'm normally a quick learner with this sort of stuff

 

[dukefawks]

You will need to invest $750+ in a BGA rework station for a start. If you have no other uses then just for practice on these machines it is a bit expensive experiment.