Component level board repair. Watch me fail here!

[Vince]

it seems to have no video output, although still spins up, its currently doing nothing other than sitting as a dead weight in a box so nothing ventured nothing gained ##would be nice to get my xfire setup back again

I'd be happy to have a look. I do know a trick for and cards which I've used to bring cards back to life before. And it doesn't even include an oven.

 

[Vince]

sent you a trust can you fire me your address over and I'll post it over.

Done my details have been sent to you. I should probably send you my phone number as well! I'll do that a bit later on today. Should be interesting to see if it is what I think it might be. I've seen a lot of 7970, 280 and 280x cards over the years so am quite familiar with them!

 

[Vince]

@Vince Is this you: https://www.youtube.com/user/mymatevince/videos ?

Bit of a coincidence though.

That is not me. Not many fellas called Vince out there though so yes a bit of a coincidence that one! My youtube channel is simply me showing bits that I did to the 911 so a walk around after the respray, a look at the exhaust I had made for it, the setup of a mirrored custom head unit, that sort of stuff really

 

[Vince]

This arrived:



Weirdly I have 3 cats and the only one that's been interested so far is tabby cat (solder cat), who knows as we go through the others might peak an interest as well All i'm waiting on now is the tweezers and lets be honest this is probably one of the most important pieces for these little projects.

 

[Vince]

Should have got some Amtech NC-559!

Is this the stuff I should be using? I'll have a little Google. Cheers

 

[Vince]

I spent a little bit of time earlier messing around with my test board:




My initial thoughts are that the magnifying glass is useless for working with but fine for checking how you are getting on between doing little bits. My soldering iron is too fine for cleanup using wick, so I need an iron with a flat rather than a pointy tip. When I took the bga chip off it came off really clean and with a pair of tweezers rather than the little screwdriver that i used to take them off I wouldn't have knocked off a tiny resistor above the chip.

The hot air station thing is actually pretty good, I was messing around with the air speed and working out the melting points of the solder on this board and it seems to do a good enough job for what I need to do for now. I'm sure if I used a much better one Id notice all the differences but for me right now it seems to be fine, It blows hot air out up to 450 degrees and really that's all you need. On this Samsung board I was up at about 390 degrees with a slow air speed of around 3 for a few minutes in the area of the bga chip with tape all around it holding everything else in place and that seemed to work.

I was trying to get every last bit of solder off of the area where the chip was sitting with the iron and a wick and knocked off one of the pads where the bga should be seated, I was kinda testing the process before i start the phone so now i'm thinking that I might need another solding iron as well. something a bit bigger but still cheap. The other option is find another head for my current iron.

Final observation, today i was testing using the liquid flux and to be honest it seems to dissipate really quickly and i didn't really get the impression it was helping me all that much. I'll move onto some of the gel stuff tomorrow or when them tweezers turn up to have a little go with that and see how it feels.

 

[Vince]

How would I know if it has a center pad?

Most of this stuff in looking at is in Swedish and whilst my everyday language is getting good in having trouble differentiating between copper pipe soldering and PCB soldering...

I understand the vulgarity of the question, let's assume I have the skill. Those 2 little chip capicitors look dangerously close though, with hot air or a fat soldering iron...

It has 8 legs

Spoiler: Bios

.

What is that bios chip on? I'd also use hot air but depending on what it's on you might be able to save it. Generally bios chips will become readable/writable at low voltage and you can disable them with high voltage. At least this is the case on some gpu, with gpu's you can bridge pins 1 and 8 until Windows boots forcing a hardware id from the device rather than the bios to be sent to Windows. The chip however won't be readable or writable so you would then need to remove the wire to flash the chip.

 

[Vince]

I appreciate all your tips.

Yes Its a straight replacement the original is expendable.

I seen a few videos and in a couple one guy saws the legs and another snips them. I thought this was a bit brutal but seemed ok...

I've bought some flux gel and some of that tape, I've also seen suggested to use the tape to hold the chip in place to help stability.

Want me to attempt to remove and replace one on a board and do a little video? Might show you what happens when a rank amature attempts it.

 

[Vince]

That would be amazing, sure if you have time.
Can I ask where in Essex you are. In a Romford boy myself.

I'm Southend area so not far at all from romford. I've found that my test board has 2 bios looking chips so will set it up now for a play.

 

[Vince]

well 12 min video... actually went well! uploading it now. It's taking forever though as im just uploading it from my phone, and because I don't have a camera for filming stuff my setup was a phone balanced in a mug pointing at what I was doing

 

[Vince]

Portrait because balancing phone in a mug! im sorry but it was the only way. I need some sort of spider phone gripper thing.

 

[Vince]

Haha thanks for that, brilliant.
I liked the melting plastic bit

I dare not use a gas iron, ill get an electric one. 100%
I need to buy some of that wick stuff too, in case. Everything else I have coming, even tweezers!

I see how much easier it is with hot air. i might consider getting one as well/instead.
if i get "lucky" i guess i could even "melt" off the old one then just drop the new chip on, not using any extra solder at all, though i obviously couldn't count on that 100%

You will need wick for sure, it's the only sure way of mopping up when like me you join all 4 pads together with a big blob of solder. Hot air really does make the process easier, hopefully you can see on the video that there are some little bits really close to the chip but with quite low air flow you can easily work around them. With an iron that might be quite a lot harder.

That hot air thing was less than 30 quid and looking at the photo you have you could probably just hot air, lift that chip off the hot air again and drop a new one in place. Just test on a random board first to get a feel for it like I just did.

 

[Vince]

Im gonna have to buy a hot air thing..... so much easier

858D so many on eBay i dunno where to start. Looks like EU plug is standard too, or kettle plug i mean.

Ah well its getting a bit pricier than it should but its an investment


How about this? its a soldering iron and a hot air in 1. Same dodgy company... kaboom

That looks alrite to me. I mean as you say it's all from the same company and looks to be the same hot air attachment that they are using so why wouldn't it be fine? I mean it looks like you got a ton of space on that board to work with as well. I'm thinking you got this.

Also I don't see why this thread should only be for following my fails and repairs. If anyone feels like sharing some of their own repairs then feel free

 

[Vince]

I'm back again with more fun. I have myself an iphone and all of the tools are now here I don't really want to do the work this late so I think the plan is to have a bash at it tomorrow a bit earlier on in the day. Tonight just for a bit of fun I thought that I would do a quick video of what the phone does and how I know it is the audio IC this may also be the last time this phone ever works, portrait again because phone is still precariously balanced in a mug, it's only a few mins long but thought it makes sense to show you:

 

[Vince]

If you are wondering why this all went a bit quiet it was simply because I have been a bit busy with other things, I did have a little time today though so have another shocking (no excuse for portrait this time), little video. I didn't film the whole lot but this is where I am at right now:

 

[Vince]

I've got an old 7870 xt that died a few weeks back.

Closer inspection revealed one or two capacitors have blown on the rear of the card if you want to try fix it. I've replaced it already so it's doing nout here.

Still got it?

It's been a while since Ive updated this but I have fixed a few things, the phone... total fail. I fixed the audio but broke so many other things most importantly I somehow broke the home button which renders the phone pretty much usless so I chalked that one up to experience and moved along. Somebody gave me a hard disk that they couldn't afford data recovery on and were ok with me doing my best so I did this to it, sacrificing the connector off of an old drive and running new tiny wires. This was fiddly but rewarding as the drive worked but was slow transfering data onto a new hdd:





Then this week there was a keyboard that a friend managed to rip the Mini USB connector off of, then proceeded to cover the board in liquid metal and destroyed all of the traces around where the connector used to be. For this I just cut the end off of a spare usb and scratched back traces to see where stuff went:







I get these are not really proper repairs but still fun to work on and mess about with.

I have a 1050ti coming as well that I bought off of ebay, not working, so we shall see what happens with that.

 

[Vince]

They didn’t work before. Now they do.

These are absolutely proper repairs. Good job!

I guess you are right. Although you wouldn't expect a pro shop to give you your HDD back with an extra couple of connectors and layers built up of Kapton tape all held in place with hot glue lol I did recover it all to a spare HDD and gave them both that and the broken drive so all good, but you would be hard pressed convincing anybody that it was anything more than ghetto. Some pads were lifting if I used wire with any gague, it was just a nightmare. Took at least an hour or more to fix.

 

[Vince]

Yeah I've stuck it up the loft at the moment. Trust me your address and I'll send it one day.

Ahh cheers dude, I need some stuff to poke and ill send it back when/if I fix it