Ripping a dying GPU off the board and running on intel gfx?

[TCRScircuit]

**Theoretically** Couldn't you pull a dying GPU off of a board and run it on Integrated GFX?

Never done this... Probably never will, But would that work? Wouldn't it see no GFX chip and run it off of intel hd gfx?

One of these days I will try and modify one to do this if it's not possible.... I would imagine you would have do something with the MUX and probably reprogram the BIOS...

That's a project for when I get better at coding..

 

[SMMRepair]

Not sure what model board you're referring to, or if you're speaking generally. The GPU/PCH isn't "just" responsible for graphics output...it handles so, so, so much more than just rendering video output. I can tell you it would NOT be possible in the sense of literally removing the chip off the board. It's just too vital and the board would never work without the chip in place.

Plus, why not just replace it with a good chip, if you're going to go that far? Just seems inefficient and most likely impossible. All of this assumes you're talking about very, very specifically-damaged GPU/PCH chips, i.e. scenarios where literally all functions of the board work fine except for dedicated-graphics output data signals. Probably not going to see many of those cases. I personally wouldn't recommend wasting your time, unless you're that curious, and you have a ton of free time.

 

[TCRScircuit]

Not sure what model board you're referring to, or if you're speaking generally. The GPU/PCH isn't "just" responsible for graphics output...it handles so, so, so much more than just rendering video output. I can tell you it would NOT be possible in the sense of literally removing the chip off the board. It's just too vital and the board would never work without the chip in place.

Plus, why not just replace it with a good chip, if you're going to go that far? Just seems inefficient and most likely impossible. All of this assumes you're talking about very, very specifically-damaged GPU/PCH chips, i.e. scenarios where literally all functions of the board work fine except for dedicated-graphics output data signals. Probably not going to see many of those cases. I personally wouldn't recommend wasting your time, unless you're that curious, and you have a ton of free time.

I was just curious.. I was refering to the 2914/15 boards from the 2011 17 inch pro's that the PCH is separate.

 

[roy.ruan]

the 2915 is possible, I had seen someone did it ,but just forget dude, it's so complicated. you must modify the signals lines from the mux to the connector and so on.
I saw the pictures that the guy uploaded, it was a huge mass already. you don't want spend hours for that

 

[G.Beard]

Forgetting hardware. You could probably disable GPU by editing ACPI tables. Like a coded castration without actually removing the balls (solder balls). If you don't know about ACPI a simple and somewhat inacurate way to explaine this would be ......

Hardware level
BIOS - ACPI
OS level

ACPI tables are held in the BIOS and feed to the OS.

These ACPI tables tell the OS what hadware there is, what to do with it, and when. Things like power managemnt, hardware IDs, how to behave with the hardware and what hardware is actually there can all be manipulated through ACPI tables like this DSDT.aml.zip that I just pulled out of my MacBook Air.

Download MaciASL and open the file. Have a look at the file. Search for "BAT0" without quotes.
Maybe read this too: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/Battery
Clearly thos is all about the battery but you get the idea.

To disable the GPU compleely and run on iGPU you would need to manipulate what the OS does with the GPU MUX as well as some other tricks and tom foolery. A method of injecting the tables is also needed.