360 repair: an update.

Some of you may remember my recent post about a 360 I purchased in order to repair.

Well, here is my update, and final verdict.

Here's how the repair went:
I had a few things to cringe at once I pulled the machine apart. One thing I noticed about the console was that there were NO screws in the machine. The motherboard wasn't being held to the box with anything except the dvd drive (which should be screwed in too) and the fan shroud. This may be a symptom of a small business that fixes xboxes. I may have just bought myself a goddamn broken parted machine. (A machine that has all unwanted parts, left over from multiple other boxes that have been repaired.)

Then once I disassembled the whole machine and pulled the mobo out, I'm greeted with this:

Other than those scratches on the mobo (I'll get to that in a sec), I clearly find a board that someone tried (and failed) to perform the famous x-clamp repair. Only these people decided to do some strange method that makes no sense. They replaced the xclamps with 4 bolts per heat sink. They used nylon (flexes easily when heated) washers and these ugly ass phillips head bolts.

If you are familiar with the method, the reason you take the xclamps out is because they flex too much under heated conditions. So, you must replace them with something that doesn't flex. They didn't replace them with anything. It appears that they simply bolted the heat sinks down, and dropped the mobo back into the case.

ABOUT THOSE SCRATCHES!


Number 1. Doesn't seem to have any effect on any operating components of the board, it kind of just floats out there in dead space, although it might cause a slight change in resistance for something.

Number 2. Worries me. It is smack in middle of a cluster of transistors directly beneath the south bridge (I think). There could be a smashed resistor in all that and that would create a permanent rrod.

Number 3. Gives me the impression that all hope is lost, and there is truly no way to fix this console. Looking at it from under a magnifying glass shows that there are tiny conduits exposed and one appears to be severed. (Once again causing a permanent rrod.)

You might be asking, "Hey Brain, what caused those scratches?" and my answer would be, "Simple, you underweight transvestite! THIS!"


Whoever was trying to fix this console was torquing down the screws !SO FUCKING HARD! that he/she slipped off of a !PHILLIPS! screw and gouged right into the board. "Why were they trying to tear a whole in the time-space continuum with their screwdriver" you ask? Again, see above video.

The real answer is, actually, that they couldn't get the rrod to go away and they kept trying to tighten it until it worked, but it never did. Their method works sometimes. But they don't even know why. If they did know why, I don't think they would be using the hardware and methods they did.

NOW BACK TO THE SHOW!

Well, now that I've bored you with my pissy little rant, I'll get back to my repair process. I bought the hardware from LLAMMA.com because I believe they probably have found the best, and most tried and true method and parts.
But their's one thing.

It may be tough for you to see there, but that bolt has -no threads- and there are -no spare bolts- to replace it.

What's a pimp to do in this kind of predicament? Well I had to resort to digging in the trash to get one of those godawful bolts from the previous owner. Luckily they are the same length as the ones I was using.


So, what I've done is, I've drilled larger holes into the metal case, and I stacked washers to replicate the same distance as what those x-clamps had. Now, the mobo is bolted to the case -by the cpu&gpu heatsinks. The metal case doesn't flex nearly as much as the flimy little x-clamps did. So now I should be ready to bake.

I've made some slight cooling modifications.

This might look light a bunch of tape and plastic to you, but there's a reason for it, I promise. You see, the gpu gets much hotter than the CPU, yet it has a smaller heat sink. This modification isolates one fan per processor in order to give the gpu it's much needed air flow.


And this one is just my sexy modification to the fan grill.

The last thing to be done, was bake it. You must run it for 15 minutes or so, with a tiny bit of airflow going to the cpu heatsink. You allow slight airflow so that the gpu gets super hot and the cpu never trips it's overheating cutoff.

Results: It didn't work, it's anyone's guess which of the formerly mentioned problems was is the main reason why it didn't work.

Oh well, back to my pc and ps3 playtime.