My adventure with electronics started in 2001 when my cousin went to vocational high school concerned with electronics. From that time i was helping him as much as i could and gathering the knowledge he had and what i could read online. During that time i have started to diagnose and service computers, which im doing with passion until now. In the vocational high school i gathered all the basic as well as advanced knowledge about electronic devices, components, their characteristics as well as the way of using measurement and repair tools. In 2008 i have acceded to the vocational examination which to pass requires the score of 75% and up which i passed on 95%. From that time I'm spending all my free time for it and studying at the same time Mobile and Wearable Computing on Aberystwyth University (Wales, UK). I have graduated this year with 2:1 degree. Currently looking for job in hardware concerned with electronics.
Its getting more and more efficiently. The heating profile i have updated to the tools i have seems to work for me without destroying any electronic elements and what is the most important.. ending up with fixed xboxes! Now i feel like i need more and more. Looks like its kind of addictive.
Recently i have bought some Xbox from a local private seller, saying it has red ring of death, i said its excellent for my practice. Straight after i gave him the money he disappeared in no time! That was at least suspicious. I said fine, its only 10 pounds.
After i brought it to my house i started to disassemble the box and found that it was opened before. When i came to the point in which motherboard appeared i found it that its surface is strangely flexed. I took the heat sinks off and found that someone tried to do some 'reballing' or maybe reheating with a very poor skill. I think whoever done it, seen some of the Xbox rumors on one of the Youtube videos according to poor designed X-clamp, and some modifications that 'work better than stock one'. Here is the video that userTheHGCGamersClub describes why its a myth and junk.
Now i want to show what i found in there:
Let me describe what it is, why and where it was used and from what components its build with.
This thing is built with a two coins (british coins, i think maybe 2 pens coins, which are kind of copper ones). There are stick together with insulation tape. This think was between the memory chips and the xbox cover to which motherboard is screwed to. It was below GPU and CPU chip as well. I dont know what the inventor of this idea was thinking about, should it fix x-clamp or create better thermal conductivity or... who knows. However, this flexed the motherboard so badly, that at that point i was sure it wont ever work, but still i could practice some of the rebelling things. I will show you the picture of motherboard as well.
You can see that some of the attempts has been done by previous owner. The job was not neat at all. Even the red glue was kind of epoxy one which was really hard to take off (usually it takes few seconds using heat, im sure the owner has no idea what kind of glue to use). Has he got any ideas what is he doing by the way...???
I have cleaned the GPU as good as i could and took of the GPU. You can see hear what i found below:
Here we can see that the surface started to corrode. Usually no-clean flux is used (i think its used by everyone now), as it can be left and will not corrode any of the electronic parts on the board. Here, was used other type of flux that needs to be properly cleaned after rework as will lead to corroding. It would not work too long.
Reballed chip (not too clean as i did not bother too much knowing theres only few percent chances it will work):
After cleaning, reballing and heating the GPU back, effect was not different that i expected, it did not work. Im not surprised at all.
I dont know if it was someones job who did it first time or some pseudo company from ebay, its terrible job. However it made my day and I'm laughing to these day how bad work someone did!
