It's finally done!

This is a Lenovo ThinkPad P71, it's the beast, the behemoth most gigantus ThinkPad ever (probably). What does it have?
- Intel Xeon 1505 CPU (3.7GHz)
- 32GB RAM
- 4K IPS Display

Taking up where I left off last time, I tackle the elephant in the audio room and this laptop does not have any sound output! I tried everything and eventually narrowed it down to a motherboard issue, even went so far as testing to see if the audio chip was getting power and it was, so I figured maybe it was the chip itself? Only one way to find out, I bought a new chip for $10 and I gave it a shot. I'm pretty n00b at board repair, but I have done a few things with some success. I attempted, I think my soldering was just fine and it's highly possible that the original chip also wasn't broken because the new chip did not fix the issue. Instead of spending more time on it, I went with plan B which was to install an external sound card and put it internally inside the laptop. The new creative chip is actually superior to the one on the motherboard, so it's a win-win.

The only real issues are the the sound card only has one input, so if I want the internal speakers also to work when headphones are not connected I'll need a way to "switch" between them. I got these switch jacks which do just that, only now I have to route all the audio through the jack which is a bit far away. I stole power from the closest USB port and that worked out just fine. The chip works as expected, only issue was that now the speaker output is maybe only 60-70% the volume of the stock sound chip. I spent even more time with some small amplifier boards and they did work great, only they introduced so much ground loop hum and noise/distortion, so I ultimately gave up on that and settled for slightly less speaker output (let's be honest, laptop speakers suck anyway). Headphone volume is loud though and everything sounds great.

Then there was the keyboard ordeal, I ended up redoing it completely and spending hours mapping out my own custom template so if I ever want to do this again, I don't have to do all that work again. After the 2nd print everything was golden, all I had to do left was add some finishing touches which were also golden, and then show it off to you guys.

Many more builds to come, thanks for watching!

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⛧ \\ Table of Contents: \\ ⛧

00:00 - Reassembly
01:33 - Audio work
04:44 - More reassembly
06:52 - Keyboard
11:35 - More reassembly even
13:41 - Sound test
14:53 - Gloriously finished

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