Razer BETTY R5 Not Booting – Is It VRMs, BIOS, or HDMI Chip?

[w0nk1]

Hi everyone,

I’m facing a frustrating issue with my Razer gaming laptop (model RZ09-0195 with the BETTY R5 V3.1 motherboard), and I’m looking for help to diagnose the problem.

Here’s the current behavior:

- When I power the laptop on, the fans immediately run at full speed, the screen stays black, the keyboard backlight doesn’t turn on, but the status LED pulses green.
- The HDMI chip (PI3HDX1204E) gets quite hot (around 55°C), even with no HDMI cable connected, which seems unusual.

Here’s what I’ve checked so far:

• I replaced the CMOS battery, and it consistently provides 3V.
• The 20V rail is present across all the fuses I’ve tested.
• Both the 3.3V and 5V lines are present.
• The BIOS chip receives 3.3V.
• However, neither the CPU nor GPU gets warm, while the chipset does heat up.
• After desoldering the HDMI chip (PI3HDX1204E) the behavior is the same

Now, here’s what happened before the laptop completely stopped working:

• The last time it powered on, it sounded like it booted normally, but both the internal and external screens stayed black. Interestingly, the external screen didn’t show a “no signal” error.
• Before that, I noticed some strange behavior. After shutting down the laptop, the backlight of the internal display stayed on, and I had to press and hold the power button to turn it off completely.
• Around the same time, I lost the ability to control the internal screen. It no longer appeared as an option in the display settings.

For any ideas or clues, I would be very grateful.

P.S.: In the past, the laptop had a faulty SiC631, which I replaced, and it worked fine for about a year after that.

Cheers
Markus