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

[Vince]

Would love a write up / video on how you troubleshoot in this way - how you discover the short, then work out which component is causing it.

I’ve a few things in the garage I’d like to dig out and troubleshoot - a smart speaker thing, tablet, etc. Would be good to have knowledge of how to test them, rather than just randomly replacing bits, which is how I’ve repaired most things before, TV’s and the like!

I have given up for the day. Managed to repair 8 items tested all the others and have ordered parts etc in vita will be fixed tomorrow and hopefully playstation 5 in next few days then ill just have ps5 pads and DS systems left

So the thing wouldnt power on at all and I just measured a short between the 12v output on the psu and ground... which is why its not turning on.. I then went about removing things connected to that rail and separating circuits from that rail to try and find isolate it... ill do a vid is probably easier. when the part comes and ill explain on that board.

 

[Vince]

Thanks for the link to this thread, as I mentioned in the Xbox Series S/X thread, my launch Series X has died, any help getting it working again would be much appreciated.

Initial diagnosis...

12v short to ground! Something has gone pop... @Diggsy - I could do a hunting the short vid on this one!

 

[Vince]

Before I go on a mad removal spree disconnecting secondary rails I'm just going to inject a little voltage. Say pump I dunno 5v 2amps into it's 12v rail and see if anything gets toasty

 

[Vince]

It was never going to be simple!

Hopefully you can get to the bottom of it, and if not, at least I know what Christmas present to ask for...

I shall find it!! its pulling like 3amps at 0.5v so something is totally pulling that rail to ground... time to start removing stuff!

 

[Vince]

It was never going to be simple!

Hopefully you can get to the bottom of it, and if not, at least I know what Christmas present to ask for...

Found it!!!

so this mosfet here:


I took some stuff off!!



and moved lots of stuff off rails to isolate it...







Ill put the 30 odd components I moved back and ill dig through my donors and see if I have a fet for it!

EDIT: All components back on the board! lets put it back together enough to test!

 

[Vince]

well its now beep on beep off... more digging to do...

 

[Vince]

Sounds like that PS5 I tried to fix.

Got the port and cap back on, everything tested out OK. Managed to get the recovery screen up and if I booted in safe mode and forced 720P it would give a display for 1-2 seconds then disconnect. Checked all pins, all properly soldered. Beyond my capabilities, told the owner to try an online service or something.

It's a launch day console that's had a hard life (ham fisted kid), so it might be better to get something with warranty

given the short was on cpu vcore... it's kinda.... I just dunno im having another look. Yea its an angry series X!

 

[Vince]

The question is.... what should we do.... Im a good few hours in, Ive found what the issue was, replaced that. one more check over with the meter and we will see!

yea had it back apart.... everything looks fine, some odd measurments around the cpu... I think its possibly dead. Going to put it to one side and mull it over for a bit.

 

[Vince]

OK - Looking through the series X schematics. U32 is our shorted fet.... It feeds soc so SOC vcore effectively on the xbox this rail is called v_soc. If you take a look the core is a bga2963 so beyond what im capable of dealing with...



basically U32 feeds @ 1.25v the SOC/IO. and goes all the way back to the core.



If the worst happened when that fet went it can potentially push 12v to 3.3v/1.25v lines to the SoC.... I think this one could be dead clive.

 

[Vince]

Looking forward to the results of this experiment!!

So some interesting things looking into this... I was looking at a series x board and its got 10 memory chips... you can see them there but the specs claim its got 16gb gddr6! I got really confused as you can imagine 10 memory chips into 16 doesn't go right? So now im into the weird series X memory subsystem dive and its super interesting!

Its got 10 chips but 4 of them are 2gb 8gb/s chips while the other 6 are 2gb 16gb/s chips... so techincally the series X actually has 20gb of gddr6 and it partitions it off in some weird and wonderful way!

Stolen from some reddit post:

1. 10 32-bit memory chips (320-bit bus)
2. 6/10 chips use 16Gb GDDR6 and the remaining 4/10 chips use 8Gb GDDR6.This requires the memory to be split into two separate segments: the "first" GB of each of the 10 chips form one 10GB 320-bit 560GB/s segment while the second GB in the 6 16Gb chips form a separate 6GB 192-bit 336GB/s.

we can indeed agree with this as the system has 10 chips but 2 different chips...





The gpu memory subsystem then is some mash up of fast and slow memory. I was hoping to pin this down a bit more but it simply means ill need to swap them all possibly. I might start by doing the 4 slow chips and then do the 6 fast... although something tells me the issue is more likely to be the faster chips so start there? its too late I have no idea.

 

[Vince]

Oh wow, that's a bizarre memory architecture. I looked into it... It's basically 6x 2GB chips and 4x 1GB chips. It ends up with 10GB of fast memory available to the GPU and 6GB of slower memory allocated for operating system, game assets etc etc.

that actually makes more sense than them all being 2gb, but the model numbers come back that they are all 2gb unless im missing something.

 

[Vince]

Always a pleasure to read this thread,

That's quite the hunt you went with that Xbox. I had heard they are notoriously weird in there but hadn't seen it before

We have barely even started we will get to swapping all of the memory on the crashing one when I have a bit of time! All ive done is not fixed @broona xbox because I went on a hunt and it didnt end that well. but I do have a good xbox here for him so he is in safe hands

I did spend a bit more time on the fixing tonight and we have so far done:

1x Series X - Fixed - HDMI Port
1x PS5 disc - Shorted Fet (waiting on parts)
1x steam deck - Fixed - Fan Connector ripped off board
8x Nintendo DS - Fixed, a mix of case damage, screens, hinges - Had more than enough spare parts to repair them all.
2x DS Fat - Not sure I can be bothered to spend much time have ordered in some shells though.
2x PSP - Both fixed white one needed a new ribbon for the R trigger, black one needed a screen, happened to have a good screen in my spares pile, and i also had a few sets of the ribbons as I keep meaning to do my own one.
1x Vita - Fixed, just a good clean and 2 new analogues.
2x PS5 pads - Not started yet.
1x Elite 2 pad - Reshelled & some new pots.

So I make that 14 of the 18 things that came done

 

[Vince]

Oh my word ...8 DS's! That's bravery. They are horrible things to work on

I find them quite easy!! Compared to say the 3ds they are a walk in the park!

 

[Vince]

we are doing amazing here...



We are now in a queue! We have to be somewhere in the region of 3 months at this point from initial contact

 

[Vince]

Sounds like ‘we don’t have any update, so here’s some waffle instead’

This is the single slowest rma/repair process I have ever seen. It genuinely absurd how long it's taken. It's basically comical at this point. I still have absolutely no idea how much this is going to cost me either and have basically agreed to what seems like an open book on costs. Just the shipping was £200 (well $250). I am pretty sure I have never been this in the dark on any rma process ever genuinely during the process of trying to get a repair I asked several times on costs and nobody wanted to give an actual figure, just send it in for this much money and we will work the rest out later seemed to be all the info they were willing to give. Wtf sort of policy is that?

It now impossible to recommend one of these to anybody because if something goes wrong they could be waiting I dunno 3 months or more for a resolution. That email "it will require some time" what is this "some" measurement? What does that represent in say seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years?

 

[Vince]

PCB for @pigeonguyuk mini fridge thing arrived. Little look under the scope and i think the most likely culprit might just be the bridge rectifier:



Its got a hole in it lads! and look how black it is on the input new bridge rectifier and a new F1 fuse which is actually a 100ohm wirewound fusing resistor that upon further inspection I dont think is bad but ill likely replace it anyway. I think ill need to clean up some of the burnt joints on the input side as well. But really I think it will work after just a new bridge rectifier.

This is it now with all the burnt joints cleaned up and the bridge rectifier removed...



Into the waiting for parts pile it goes

 

[Vince]

PS5 with blown fet...



Bosh, 15 out of 18 fixed!! Just a few pads to go now and some DS fat systems.

I wish I could post a gif as for sure I would have made an awesome gif out of the little dance i did

 

[Vince]

It’s almost sounding like a one man band type operation…with the one man not having a clue what they’re doing either!

I can't speak I've had some people's stuff for ages. Some stuff I turn around super quick, other things not so much. Some stuff is just seemingly impossible for me to fix as I just don't have the tools for certain jobs. For example I'm not stupid enough to attempt an early PS3 rsx because I simply don't have the tools to do a proper job.