Hi all,

Recently my G550JK suddenly died. In the local ASUS service center told me, that the motherboard is defective and that replacing with a new one would cost $1500 /Oh yes, sure :rolleyes:/. After this suggestion I tried to repair the MB by myself and almost succeeded, but this is experience for another thread :). Either way, I had to order from e-Bay new replacement motherboard for $200 - N550JV Rev 2.1, featuring the same P/N and hardware- CPU Intel i7 4600HQ-3300Mhz, GPU Nvidia GTX 850M 4GB DDR3. As a matter of fact, the PCB appears in an absolutely identical way to the original one including imprints, chips, stickers etc. I installed it, the laptop powered-on normally, all the hardware was correctly recognized and worked just the way as with the old MB. The only visible difference is in the 'ASUS' boot logo instead of 'ROG' because of different BIOS version. The BIOS is reported to be for N550JK platform, instead of G550JK. I desoldered the BIOS chip /Winbond W25Q64VF/ from the old defective MB and dumped it in bin file. Also I downloaded the latest BIOS update file from ASUS official website. In other words, I'm ready to reflash the BIOS of the new MB. But since doing this there is always a chance to end up with a bricked laptop, I would like to hear your opinions whether it makes sense to do it, provided that everything looks good at first glance. The information I was able to find about the ' G ' and ' N ' models is that they differ only in design, but is it true? Is it possible to have any peculiarities in the BIOS of G550, which optimizes the performance of the hardware for this model?