Vince's Ebay Repair Thread - (Console Repairs & Mods)

[drakulton]

@drakulton - It is here! got home today and it was sitting here waiting for me. I'll start doing some diag on this bad boy tonight - Will update the thread as I start working on it. GP104-200 so Nvidia 1070 and luckily I have a similar card from the same series that I may be able to salvage parts from

Cheers Vince. I don't want to hijack this thread so what about this -

Vince's Ebay Repair Thread - (Graphics cards)

 

[NutritioN]

Haha, I did have a mostly working RTX3080 that had some funky issues I considered asking you about Vince! Ended up selling it as faulty.

Sorry I've not done customer review on the GG yet , either been away, no batteries or crashing my bike and getting injured.

 

[Vince]

@Vince so lets say common graphics cards faulty you could find fault and repair if no one has had ago before obviously ?

Electronics is electronics, the fault finding process is much the same. If nobody has taken parts off then yea I see no reason why not. Although something like a core reball might be a little outside what I can do right now as I dont 'yet' have a bga station for something as big as a core. yet...

 

[Vince]

Haha, I did have a mostly working RTX3080 that had some funky issues I considered asking you about Vince! Ended up selling it as faulty.

Sorry I've not done customer review on the GG yet , either been away, no batteries or crashing my bike and getting injured.

All good mate. So long as its still working - we should have given it a usb-c upgrade package.

 

[Vince]

well @drakulton - its got a 12v short to ground on vcore. So its unlikely to also have core issues. likely a faulty mosfet. Ahh ive also found something else... second ill get some pics up.

 

[Vince]

also @drakulton - can you tell me exact model is it an NV reference board? We have what appears to be a missing component.

edit: the board has a misssing coil this might explain our issue. I can see the legs of where the poor fella once was.

 

[Vince]

OK final diag after some playing about and looking at all the 1070 board images I can find.. L31 coil is missing and therefore the cards memory, or a least a chip related to controlling that memory isn't getting power... I'm thinking my reading over on the vcore line might just be very low impedance to ground. Now we need to find out what that coil is.

 

[drakulton]

also @drakulton - can you tell me exact model is it an NV reference board? We have what appears to be a missing component.

edit: the board has a misssing coil this might explain our issue. I can see the legs of where the poor fella once was.

Yep, it was very reference. Hmmm, i may have the coil still stuck to one of the heatsinks. I did say it was good thermal cement.

 

[Vince]

Yep, it was very reference. Hmmm, i may have the coil still stuck to one of the heatsinks. I did say it was good thermal cement.

Haha can you have a look see if she is there?



ive ripped the other off so I can test stuff should have just left them all on there!

 

[drakulton]

yep, it's all safe and sound stuck to the heatsink. I'll try to remove it to see if there's markings on it. Not sure if it's resolderable as it looks like the side pads are still with the PCB.

 

[Vince]

yep, it's all safe and sound stuck to the heatsink. I'll try to remove it to see if there's markings on it. Not sure if it's resolderable as it looks like the side pads are still with the PCB.

they are but it should be salvagable.

 

[Vince]

yep, it's all safe and sound stuck to the heatsink. I'll try to remove it to see if there's markings on it. Not sure if it's resolderable as it looks like the side pads are still with the PCB.

any update on markings or can you get whats left of the little fella over to me?

 

[Vince]

Guess who now has a working Atari Lynx I'll post a full update soon but have also decided to buy a new main power mosfet for it so that will take a few days to get here!

 

[Vince]

Today I started having a look at the lynx, the problems appear to be that it doesn't always want to turn on and when it does this is the best you can get




When I was tearing it down I spotted this... battery acid leak at some point in its life... So I decided to look at the board where that might have landed.

It's got this both top and bottom so both sides of the board. This is the top side with a cap removed. Really not a lot of space to work here... This is the area... microfibre protecting the screen.. volume and brightness button also removed.

Take a look at that trace near c42 marking...



Scraped a bit and the trace in that area is non existent. This is it cleaned up and tinned up ready for a jumper

Trace repair done...

Not being sloppy on this one so masked the area:

Scraped back some other areas.. and tested all the rotten vias



More nasty traces:



Test point 10.... What test point 10?


But this area started getting hot... So I swapped out that cap (ive not recapped it, the caps on there are clearly somebody else's attempt to fix this one) but the area is still getting hot, when I mean hot I mean burn you if you touch it hot!



This little fella is our culprit, its a mosfet, I did some digging and it looks like you can swap it out with an On Semi MTP3055E which is seemingly a direct modern replacement. Given I havent spent a penny other than some magnat wire and time getting it up and running £5 on a decent mosfet isn't the end of the world.

After a while this happened!!



Waiting on that replacement mosfet then I'll get it back together and get some nice pics!

 

[Vince]

Good news, I got given another broken unpatched switch for repairing a switch lite. The lite was a pretty easy fix and only needed a new fuel gague IC so I now have a broken OG switch to work on again!

 

[Vince]

yep, it's all safe and sound stuck to the heatsink. I'll try to remove it to see if there's markings on it. Not sure if it's resolderable as it looks like the side pads are still with the PCB.

Coil just turned up - Will try and get some time with it tomorrow. Really needed that before the troubleshooting begins! Have also made a china order for some incase I cannot repair this one.

 

[drakulton]

Coil just turned up - Will try and get some time with it tomorrow. Really needed that before the troubleshooting begins! Have also made a china order for some incase I cannot repair this one.

Man, that thing is pretty tiny. Cutting back the package to hang some solder snotters on to what's left of the copper traces should be fun.

 

[Vince]

Man, that thing is pretty tiny. Cutting back the package to hang some solder snotters on to what's left of the copper traces should be fun.

It's monstrous compared to say a max IC on the switch.

 

[Emlyn_Dewar]

Awesome stuff, looks like difficult work! How fiddly is it to manipulate small wire like that to repair traces?
The Lynx is just not a system I have used much, think I’ve only ever played one game on one.

I had to sell on my gameboy lights. Cool thing was I managed to change the power switches on them and recapped one. The first time I’d ever soldered anything in my life, and definitely a learning experience. Bad thing was both had no sound, and both had damage to the boards in this area. I thought it would just be dodgy speakers. Skilled people will be able to find a place to solder the speaker cable to, it’s beyond me though!

 

[Vince]

Awesome stuff, looks like difficult work! How fiddly is it to manipulate small wire like that to repair traces?

That wire is 0.1mm so pretty small and what I use for a lot of trace repair. Honestly the first time you do it its tricky, there is no space to work, you cant see the wire under the iron and you use the force you do start getting used to how it behaves though and what you can and cant do with it. Once you feel that out it is pretty simple