Posted in Uncategorized on September 6th, 2010 by admin
Sorry I have been missing, haven’t had a whole lot of time to post anything. My recent masquerades take us into the world of new-age gaming, my xbox 360 has been dead for a very long time. so i thought I would; a. get it fixed or b. fix it myself. Thinking it would probably be safer if i got it fixed by someone, but that turned out to be 45 dollars too much for me, of course i decided to fix it myself.
First allow me to rave for a few moments at Microsoft’s failure to understanding hardware. When you first open the 360 everything seems fine, its all great, until you unlatch those ridiculous x clamps and remove the heat-sinks. How much thermal paste should go on a processor core? A very very think layer which coats the processor, Microsoft doesn’t understand this concept. Instead they put a very LARGE amount of thermal paste on, not only covering the cores but surrounding them as well. When you put that much thermal paste on any processor, the paste acts as an insulator and causes the processor to overheat and damage surrounding areas of the motherboard or the processor itself.
My 360 is one of the first models created, and apparently the first models ran pretty hot as it is. The problem it was having was every-time I would play a game, it would freeze and produce an argyle pattern across the screen than it would RROD on me. What causes this issue is the processor overheats thus producing gratuitous amounts of heat and melts surrounding solder. This can cause chips to separate from the board and make things not work right. I used the famous “xclamp fix” and replaced the x clamps, and learned a soldering technique known as “reflow” which involes either an expensive high grade heat gun, or a cheapo heat gun from walmart. Pretty much you toast the backside of the motherboard, and than flip it over to toast ONLY the processors and memory. Thank god i missed the capacitors, did not want to replace those.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEvfBS6Tams This is the video I watched and used for technique, yea it seems scetchy but it works! I did not reapply the x clamps, I used this list I found off the net for the x clamp fix. Tutorials to come!
From lowes part numbers are included.
1. 8x m5-.80×10 machine screws (#138433)
2. 16x 5mm flat metal washers (#138319)
3. 16x 5mm #10 flat nylon washers (#139065)
4. Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste
(cant get this from lowes, but you can get it from a computer parts store.)
Now, my 360 is working, but it runs extremely hot. I will explain more in depth some other time. Pictures to come soon, I am going to hardware mod my xbox.
>:O need more fans!!!!
