XBOX360 BGA reball

[Ian T]

Hi there,

Has anyone tried repairing the RROD faults by carrying out a BGA reball at home? If so, was it successful?

I tried a simple reflow, but without putting pressure on the processor to lower it as the solder melted. I suspect the liquid flux lifted it slightly if anything, so I'm considering desoldering the GPU entirely, cleaning it up and then reballig it with lead solder balls to get a better joint.

Anyone done this?

Ian.

 

[dave24]

If you give oggy a shout he would be able to give you some sound advice about re-balling , think he still does it also , dilly1066 might do it also but not 100% on that , i know he does re-flows. What are you using for re-flowing?.

 

[dont do it it"ll hurt]

me and a m8 are in the process of learning this it aint for the faint of heart and cost a bit to get going
reballing the chip is poss the hardest bit
lifting- cleaning and re-placing is the easy part

 

[Ian T]

Thanks for the replies

Interesting that you say the reball is the hardest part, as I was more worried about being able to remove the ICs without damaging the board and then place them again accurately enough afterwards.

I've watched a few youtube videos that show the process pretty clearly, but don't (yet) have any of the kit and so haven't attempted to lift anything.

As for my last attempt at re-flowing - I preheated the board in the kitchen oven after making a bespoke heat shield out of aluminium trays with cut outs both sides around the processors, then once it had heat soaked for a while I removed it (complete with a baking stone to keep the temp up) while I used a heat gun and optical thermometer to warm up the processor and about an inch of board all around to (I forget) the recommended temperature.

I think where I went wrong on that was I didn't remove the waxy/rubbery adhesive strips from around the processor and so when the solder melted, I expect they expanded and lifted the device off the pads rather than it settling down. A rework with 'real' solder would presumably do a better job.

I'm really interested in doing this for myself as the xbox got replaced last year when it died with a slim model and there's a challenge there to get it going again.

Similarly I was given a HP DV series laptop with the problematic Radeon GPU that has the same problem, so I' like to fix that as well - otherwise a capable machine and a shame to bin it.

I can get access to the proper rework hood at work with the infrared and air heaters, so that could be an option, but wouldn't it be nice to say 'I fixed that in my oven...' ?

Cheers,

Ian.

 

[dont do it it"ll hurt]

as long as the chip is kept within it's heat range then it will be fine
if you watch the vids you might think the reball is easy but think again it can be up to an hour or more getting all the balls in the right place the rest is a peace of cake compared to it tbh imho

 

[Kwiknick]

I sent mine back to microsoft, got it back in a week, cost me £70 quid approx, as it was just out of warranty, but its a known issue, should be free cos its their design fault.

 

[fes_786]

the xbox 360 gpu are known to pop corn due to excess moisture in the chip causing hot / cold spots

its not hard to do if u got proper kit

the hardest part of it all is getting a desoldering and reattach profile setup
it can take days of experimenting and tweaking im still learning it yet lol

 

[TombRaid]

Will i gathered all the Required tools to do it at home and will start on it shortely;
i bought the Ayoue 968A+ rework station, Puhiti T8082 Preheater. and all the other small

tools.
also try to buy a good Flux,
i did the reflow , it worked, but still did not do the Reball, i have 5 Mobos laying down to

start working on them