TsunamiJuan's Hot Air Rework Shananigans(56k warning)

How about some more air rework station debauchery there all mighty one

I'll try to do some more soon, a couple people where suppose to be sending me motherboards to replace sockets on, but seem to have decided it wasnt worth the time. Might have to do some convincing. Definitely want to give it a shot at some point.

Otherwise its just been surface mount and volt mods lately . Will try to get some more crazy stuff going. Might have Some easy reflow soldering to do soon that i can throw up pics of

TsunamiJuan said:

Might have Some easy reflow soldering to do soon that i can throw up pics of

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WooHoo

alright so IMOG finally sent me his MIVE to replace the socket on. Gonna pick it up for bobnova later today, on my way to work. Then I probably get to it either sunday or monday. I am charging the battery for my SLR right now aswell. So I post some high quality pictures (ie not off my cellphone).

This will make use of the 1800watt PCB heater I bought a few months ago.

Well I Have finally gotten to some of the stuff on my bench, A considerable amount of work got done today actually. Some of its over the course of the week but learned some great things today. Finally had a chance to try out a few new tools.

So for starters IMOG's MIVE, I tore into a few weeks ago partly. I gave it a good wash and scrub in preperation for removal of the socket. I discovered in the process that some of the SMD caps on the bottom Side of the socket On exit from the decoupling cap. Where FRIED, not slightly but Roasty Toasty and Charred.





After a pain in teh butt desoldering them (its really rough work desoldering anything in the power section of a motherboard, Large Heavy copper planes make it wick the heat away). Ended Up buying a pair of soldering iron Tweezers, Dual 60watt soldering irons on a Hinge, works great on small boards still not so great on mobo's. However when you have two highwattage Irons at your disposal you can make it work. Cranked em both up to 11 (okay 450c not 11) and that made quick work of it. In order to Trouble shoot I threw some larger low ESR caps on it from the volt mod bag. SUCESS it works again. Also Found The broken pin from the socket still in the socket. Took me some tender working and a pair of SMD tweezers to remove it (no damage done to the surrounding pins. This pin was shorting across the positive and negative lines inside the socket.



While we are the subject of CPU sockets. I had a chance to try out my CPU socket Dummy loads. These things are amazing from a repair point of view. I wish I could read the directions for them, However I dont speak chinese in any form. I used the simplfied version which consists of a 8layer PCB with a LGA pinout matching the socket. With a battery attached to it, and a series of lights on the surface. You can use it in two forms. You can use it without power going to the board, just make sure you have the battery in it, It will check the main lines of the chip for shorts and such. It also provides a load so that you can start to power up the board. As I previously found LGA 1155 boards will power on without a load in the socket. Once you start the board it Confirms voltages on the lines being present with a brighter version of the led's kicking in.




Also learned in the process that firm even pressure across a lga socket is really important, same with having a back plate on the chip. You really need quite a bit of pressure to insure good contact between the pins and the chip. Witnessed this first hand with the Dummy loads making contact with the pins.

Just waiting for replacement caps to showup in the correct size for IMOGS board and i will finish up the repair and burn it in.

Video cards

Soo yes mr lazy got off his behind and finally started to volt mod his 7770 . Sadly I somehow damaged the card I am thinking before I even modded it. It got dropped a few times. That Or I heat killed some of the Super Super Tiny resistors and caps while modding it. But I got a chance to make use of some more of my new tools that I have accumulated for repair and modding.

I had bought a bag of 100 solder on smd test point hoops, Along with two bags of 10 each, Hook type test clips. Which can hook around through hole leads, and the pins of larger IC's. I had previously seen that TiN had been using some for testing stuff with a scope, and knew that they where something I wanted to have in my bag of tricks. Man they are great, They have a tiny insulator around them so you dont accidently short them into something else, the test clips are pretty much fully insulated short of a tiny tiny amount. I also found that if I just solder a stripped end of PSU's molex cable they fit into the hole and make perfect contact with the inside of the clips. Win Win and WIN.









Will Have to do some heavy digging to figure out where the power phases on the card are having problems, If not its ZOMBIE MOD TIME I really wanted to zombie that card anyways. Looks like I will probably get my wish.

Look for missing PCIe signal caps, they're the strip right next to the PCIe slot. Crucial little things.

So after talking with TB about replaceing a socket on his MVG I got teh itch to experiment... Why does this allways happen at 2am.. its bad for everyone involved usually.

So I had a cheap 1155 board that did work (till umm yours truely screwed the pooch in the process of this). Figured since it was a 60$ board instead of a 200$ board it was worth the pratice and if it died it wouldnt really be to much of a loss. So I fired up the preheater. Which worked like a charm now that I am running it at 220v instead of 110v. Took the pre heater up to 250c, there is quite a bit of temperature loss between the Plates and the board, not to mention the board acts as a huge heatsink. But it easily took the board up to 170c at that temp. Which made my work alot easier.



I had put down a ton of flux in the center of the socket and around the edges, Which is good for removal. However turns out this stuff smokes something crazy starting at about 70c. So at 3am i set off the smoke alarm in the process of doing this. This caused me to rush somewhat as the other people in the house where yelling at me for this. Rushing caused me to damage the tracings on the board and have partial cooling during removal. So this board is now dead and probably not repairable.



Turns out the solder mask and epoxy get rather soft at these temperatures which makes it very easy to improperly remove the socket due to uneven heating. So next time for starters More heat, less flux. And a plcc extrator to remove the socket straight up so i don't accidently clip the smd caps in the middle of the socket like I did. Also need to get a good fume extractor. And not wear shorts while doing this since i dropped the hot socket on my leg. Hot flux hurts incase you wonder You dont need to try that out for yourself. Be glad that I did it for you .

Postive side of things, I will never make these mistakes again, and I know the melting points for this stuff now so it will be easy to correctly replace sockets from here out. which is good for everyone on the benching team.

Bonus plus side: Lots of parts for modding other boards!

First time going through this thread. Freaking awesome man

I didn't realize how crazy some of the members have become in modding. Keep this up.

Just had a good read through this thread and this is some excellent work!

Not the normal hot air rework really, but I used the hot air to remove the Chokes on this this 680 Beware of zombies They're invading.

It certainly makes things easier when you have a large mass acting as a heatsink, Like a choke. Also helps you from having to crank the temperature higher on your iron, so you wont have a chance of heat killing near by components.

Let the games begin. The end is near!!! okay not really but we do have some zombies in the sun

Zombie mod is as good as its gonna get for me right now, time permitting and funds. Added extra caps, and ended up having to zombie the ram aswell. But cards working and is now conformaled and ready to run. Infact I've got 8lbs of Dice waiting to break it in.

Next time i do this, i am gonna have some larger guage wire. Like some 8-10 stuff. Should make of for the droop better. Plus shorters key anyways not really something i could do to well in this case :\ o well live and learn.

Stripped down card, masked off and ready for conformal.



backside of the card showing off the added 1100uf caps that have been added on.

one word run on for this "in-freaking-sane". I love it

did you max it out and get some results yet? I am anxiously waiting.

card has a cold bug, and wont go past 1.43volts .... so it was almost a waste zombie modding it. but the mod works it has a cold boot bug aswell.

As i have said before about vrm control circuits they tend to dislike the cold. This card is no exception. The two PLL phase controllers to the right and the left of the core on the back of the card are tempermental at anything -27c or greater. The card itself if the system gets rebooted will not turn back on till you get it to -65c.

Mhz wise got it to +280 on the core which boost its somewhere in the mid 1400 mhz range, and the ram is pretty well maxxed out at 1821, though it might be willing to do a stable 1853 with the ram cold, i can't say i really tried it.

Will give it another run tommarow and try to get some solid results in before the contest ends. But i am running out of patience for it. Its just really tempermental when cold. Which makes actually locking down a good run very difficult. Will probably end up buying a 680 classified at some point. It really beats the time and tweaking required to pull this off.

Did you use your SS on it? Did you improve over your posted result?

Hey TJ!

You ever get a chance to check out that Lightning of mine?

Curious what you experts found when you looked at it if so.

Convicted1 said:

Hey TJ!

You ever get a chance to check out that Lightning of mine?

Curious what you experts found when you looked at it if so.

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I took a brief look at it. I haven't taken the time yet to really crack into the inner workings of it and figure out where the shorts/failures are.

As for improving on my scores, Yes and no, I am gonna take some time tommarow to really crack into trying to get some better scores out of it, from a complete run. When it doesn't boot 100% of the time due to cold but it makes things difficult :\ . I was running the CPU on the phase change unit again, and I had the tek9 with dice + isophrophyl.

TsunamiJuan said:

I took a brief look at it. I haven't taken the time yet to really crack into the inner workings of it and figure out where the shorts/failures are.

As for improving on my scores, Yes and no, I am gonna take some time tommarow to really crack into trying to get some better scores out of it, from a complete run. When it doesn't boot 100% of the time due to cold but it makes things difficult :\ . I was running the CPU on the phase change unit again, and I had the tek9 with dice + isophrophyl.

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No biggy... Whenever you get to it.

As I said... Willing to pay ya for your services.

I'm just hoping its salvageable.

I'll try to crack into it sometime soon. Its not looking to promising for that card though :\