Deep-Cleaning a Viewer's NASTY Game Console! - GCDC S1:E2

Look what we found another visitor! This is really gross but I'm not really surprised it was in here either. Oh, and check it out we've got another one and where there's two folks there's more so I'm yeah kind of not looking forward to (*Greg, you got an MBA to clean roaches out of computers?*) This here is . A Viewer's VERY Dirty Game Console and in this video we're gonna deep clean it welcome to GCDC stay with me! 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So for those who are new to this playlist the goal here is simple. We reach out to folks in and around the Orlando Florida area and offer to deep clean their gaming consoles for free we also have the PCDC series where we deep clean personal computers and we also have the Fix or Flop series where we attempt to fix those computers so there's a quite a bit going on right now in the area and I'm grateful to folks like this gentleman here who gave us their XBOX 360 Elite to clean in a few days this one doesn't look too dirty I'll admit from the shell just on the outside but there is dust caked up in a lot of places and he showed me some interesting "behind-the-scenes" photos of what it looks like underneath this shell not pretty yeah you can see there is dust caked up in a lot of places and that means that the internals around the main board especially maybe even the the fan and the heatsink those are all going to be caked in dust (Just like your career Greg) and that's exactly what this video will seek to remedy we're going to clean up all this mess and try to get this thing looking as close to brand new as possible given the small imperfections that we have cuts and things in the plastic that we can't get rid of obviously we can get rid of the dust and hopefully get this thing running much cooler and quieter again. Now this one here as I said is an XBOX 360 Elite and chances are if you were born in the early to mid 90s you had one of these in your home. This thing came out back in 2007 which makes this almost a 15 year old console I can't really believe that it's pretty nuts that this thing is already this old because I remember playing like Forza 4 on my XBOX 360 I had a white one not a black one like this and that's really one of the only differences between the Elite and the standard XBOX 360. this had a matte black finish and it shipped with a 120 GB hard drive standard now one more caveat about this specific console here I forgot to mention earlier is the fact that we aren't even sure it functions the owner told me that it's been sitting in his house for several years that makes it the perfect GCDC candidate but we might need to be doing a bit of fixing to get this functioning if it doesn't already out of the gate we're going to test it before we start taking things apart and then once we deep clean it all and I kind of give the main board a once-over and check connections and things we'll try to boot it up again after all is said and done we want to make sure that it still functions if it functioned to begin with and we've already you know disassembled it and things but if it doesn't work before maybe deep cleaning this thing could fix whatever was causing it not to function ahead of time (Yeah Greg, that'll work...) So let's test it out Now, I almost forgot that these XBOX's don't have integrated power supplies so I would have been *family-friendly* because I don't have this proprietary connector here so I'm I'm grateful that the Viewer remembered that because I totally forgot to even ask him for it so let's plug this in and we're gonna give it a shot mechanical hard disk drive sounds but she works that's awesome he really wasn't that confident that it was gonna work so the fact that it does is pretty sweet now I'm not sure about long-term testing I don't know if it will overheat or whatever if we happen to kind of let this drag out and stay on for a good while but I'm just worried about it POST'ing to begin with and that is a great start so we know that we should look for this again once we deconstruct it deep clean it and put it all back together so to get started with disassembly for these old XBOXes, the first thing we need to do is remove the hard disk which is mounted on top of the console and yeah that was easy next up we need to remove the top and bottom meshes and for this we're going to need to pull on some tabs we might actually be able to just start from one end because this looks like it has been opened before you can see what these tabs kind of look like what you want to push on from the inside of each of these grilles one of these tabs is already missing so it must have broken off when it was previously disassembled which is a shame but I think It'll still work it should still be held in place no problem on this side it's just a little bit tougher because it's a tad bit recess into the frame but this one should there we go and all 6 clips it looks like on this one are good to go so we only have one broken clip on the other side now check out how gross it is inside these grills a lot of dust caked up in here and if it's caked up here chances are it's probably caked up in the console as well in and around the main board you can see the other side is well arguably worse very dusty here as well next we can remove the front cover this should be okay that was easier than I thought now interestingly enough it looks like this console has also been opened fully because the little sticker there that I think is for warranty has already been cut and there's no other reason to cut that other than to take it fully apart to service something inside so curious to see what we'll find in here now there are a few clips that hold both halves of this shell together undo these and things should for the most part slide out there might be a couple more at the back that I'm not aware of aha so this tool here actually super useful for these because you can just shove one end of this into each clip and now I think we can just pull up there we go now it's time to remove some torque screws these shinier chrome looking ones are the ones that are holding the other half of the shell together I believe these let's see if I can eyeball it here I'm thinking t8 a little loose I think it's t9 dang it I was close I always like I was like guesstimating yes t9 it is now let's see I think there's a retention clip here preventing us from removing this there we go okay now that that's been removed I think we can slide this on up nice all right so this console is yeah it's freaking gross it's the perfect candidate for the GCDC plus I'm glad we selected it again based off the earlier pictures it just it looked like a viable candidate but I'm really glad we're taking the time to clean this one because it doesn't look like it's ever been cleaned in its life and when you think about the fact that most of the dust it accumulates inside homes is human skin or dead human skin that can yeah that can be pretty off-putting for a lot of people I've been doing this a lot though recently and so it doesn't really bother me too much I need to disassemble a few more things before we can actually start cleaning things out so we need to take the optical drive out we need to take the heat sink apart we need to take the two fans out and we'll try to get the main board out of this frame as well just look at how much dust is kicked up on top of this heat sink this is right on top of the APU mind you which is in charge of all processing so you don't want to have this stuff caked up here it's very inefficient a lot of the heat that gets trapped by this heat sink needs to be dumped by the fans but if you have this dust here it acts sort of like an insulator and keeps the heat trapped here which can affect performance long term a lot of folks tend to think that because these are consoles they just they either work or they don't they think that it's very binary which is not the case you'll see frame drops you'll see that random stutter frame dips that are actually pretty constant throughout playback sometimes as well if the dust cakes up a lot and that's exactly what is happening here this is right on the verge of becoming a console that overheats and what I mean by overheats is well it has to throttle itself back the apu does in order to save itself from further harm because it's running too hot it's running outside of the temperature threshold that the designers had in mind for this unit now this is a shot of the other side of that major heat sink and you can see that dust is getting caked on the intake side of the heatsink because the fans that are further toward the top of this picture are actually exhausting air so they're pulling air in through the heat sink and exhausting it out the rear of the console the air comes in from the sides which are perforated right so all this dust being caked up here is actually impeding airflow as well which is double trouble so let's press on with this disassembly then starting first with the optical drive which I think just slides on out I don't think there's anything actually holding it in apart from the screws that were holding the shell together let's see I think it just comes right up yep there's a bit of adhesive on the bottom side of this and we also need to mine the connections obviously I think there's just one oh there's two okay so one of these here for power carefully undo that and then this other one here looks like a sata data cable just like you'd find in your PC that's basically what this is here we go and we can remove the optical drive we can now remove the optical connections from the main board side as well I want to be very careful here there's one and let's see the data connection is a bit tougher there we go there's two now we can remove this front power plate I think we have two t8 torx screws slightly smaller than the chassis ones we ended earlier you can remove this little cover here for the leds there we go and then you can see one more torque screw here at the bottom and now the board should slide right out since it slots into the main board through this port right here also you that that looks like I don't know what that looks like that's a bug look what we found another visitor this is really gross but I'm not really surprised it was in here either oh and check it out we've got another one and where there's two folks there's more so I'm yeah kind of not looking forward to finding what else is in here oh yep okay here's another one inside of the power board so they were definitely shacking it in here next up I think we can remove this white shroud here that kind of directs air out the rear of the console doesn't look like it's held by anything anymore though I might be might be wrong see we're good on that side where's my pry tool there we go just one clip and that should be it all right it is nasty in here also ew what the heck is that looks like a larger roach slash some other bug I'm not aware of that's that's really freaking gross all right that is more like it wow that's really freaking gross oh boy let's just set this here for now the best way to remove these in my experience is with a flathead screwdriver you come in from one side and just rotate you want to be careful not to nick any of the smds on the back side of this board you can see comes up fairly easily this heat sink should just attach like so okay so here is our motherboard with a bear actually I forgot this was a split design here oh interesting oh and we've got another critter trapped here at the base of this fan assembly speaking of which we need to get this out of here it's held in very simply by a couple of clips here and I think if we pull back we can get the CPU out it's a bit stubborn there we go and then this should angle its way out and then we can pull it up there we go almost it's being held in by one more post I think nice see I don't care who you are this is freaking disgusting I know there's worse out there sure and there's plenty of stuff that's not as gross as this and every now and then I see somebody in the comments say oh you think this is bad I've seen so much worse well okay cool you might have seen worse but you know what at the end of the day this is still really disgusting I think that we can look at this objectively and say yeah this is not something i'd want in my hole same goes for the inside of this frame where the fans used to sit that's that's freaking caked my dudes so that's about it folks thanks for watching and thanks for cleaning with me joking it's a joke it's okay relax we are not even halfway through the video yet I assume because we've still got the bulk of the work to do yes we took everything apart but we still gotta deep clean everything and then we gotta put it all back together now a few disclosures you guys some of you asked about the optical drives and I did wanna talk about this a tad in episode two before we get too deep into this so if anyone else asks in the future just refer them to this time stamp in this video I don't want to take these apart I I it's not that I'm afraid of hurting myself in here there's just a lot of very sensitive stuff in here it's a bit like it's a bit like taking apart a hard disk drive right I mean we'll clean the external parts of the hard disk drive but I'm not going to take those apart and clean inside where the platters are and the lasers and things it's just it gets very finicky in there and I don't want to risk damaging this because I don't want to have to replace it and and to that end there's really no active airflow moving through this apart from the disk that you insert and remove over and over again there should be no reason why inside of here is as dirty as this it's probably a bit dirty but as long as it's still reading discs and not making strange sounds it's probably fine so that's why I don't take those apart but I will obviously clean everything else as much as I can now a lot of these plastic bits and things we're actually just going to blast those with water even this frame here I don't really like using water on bare metal but as long as you dry it off fairly quick it shouldn't tarnish or leave any weird residue now the main board obviously the fans the heat sinks those are the things that we're going to clean here in the studio and I'm going to show you all of it including the outside work right now (*NO way this works when you're done Greg*...) oh yeah this one is looking so much better *Scrub-a-Dub-Dub* and now for the plastic shell and the last few pieces now I'm going to drive everything off by hand and I can already tell you especially these plastics are looking so so much nicer just from being hit with water and this is why I try to use it as much as possible you could actually add soap to this if you wanted and get even get even more thorough with the cleaning but I don't think here we're gonna need to the outside of this console was already kind of sort of clean now the only piece that actually didn't fare too well and this wasn't really my doing it was already kind of like this when we opened it up is this piece here it has quite a bit of staining on it that was not removed with water so this one we might need to use some ipa on just to see if it comes up and if it doesn't well nothing more we can really do apart from replace this piece and it's not really all that vital I think it's just an interference shield doesn't really serve any other function so I think we'll just leave it as is there's no sense dropping more coin into a console that's this old next up fans and heatsink it's gonna focus there we go I'm taking the stuff outside this time because I've learned my lesson and we'll clean the rest of this inside with some ipa and q-tips next up this super gross heat sink should be fairly easy whoops there we go you can see this is where the anti-static nylon bristles in this electric duster come in super handy pardon the wind I'm outside you can dig really deep into these heat sinks here and really scrub away if there is anything remaining inside that you can't reach then you can just blast it with water it should be fine for these now we can tackle the thermal paste at the bottoms of both of these heat sinks and yes it's pretty it's pretty tough it's not wanting to come up definitely old stuff got to kind of scrape it away with my pry tool jeez this stuff is it's rough you know your thermal paste is bad when you have to literally chip at it to get it to come up ugh right so now we've the fan assembly to clean so we've got ipa and I've got q-tips here and all we're going to do we're going to start with the perimeters of each of these fan housings and we're going to work our way in to the centers of these blades a lot of dust that gets kicked up around these frames and yeah just look at how dark that q-tip already is and that's just from scrubbing around one single time so we'll have to do this multiple times to get this thing looking brand new by the way each of these fans typically in a PCDC or GCDC video takes about 15 to 20 minutes to clean potentially longer depending on how complex the fan blade assemblies are but in this case the blades themselves are quite small and there aren't too many blades so we can actually do this rather quick by comparison so it's not too bad I've spent the longest I've spent on a fan about about 45 minutes and after those 45 minutes were up I just I said you know what it's good enough sometimes the perfectionist in me likes to take advantage of the situation and I find myself just spending way too much time on a single small component when I could probably be cleaning it a bit smarter using something else so the q-tips are nice again because I can be precise but at the end of the day it doesn't make sense to spend one hour cleaning a single fan especially when there are multiple of those fans in the same system wanna make sure you get all the tight spaces because that's where dust really likes to hang out and we're almost finished with this we've been scrubbing for about 10 minutes or so off camera I think maybe go once once more over the blades they like to hide dust after I go over them once or twice with q-tips every now and then you'll see more dust pop up once the ipa dries a bit frustrating but this is looking a lot cleaner now I think I'm going to hit it with the electric duster one more time all right these fans look so much better now now for this optical drive again it's going to be pretty straightforward I'm just going to put a little bit of ipa here on the top we'll let this soak into our shop towel and then we can clean we'll just wipe away a lot of this surface dust you could also use a vacuum or an electric duster like the one we have but I prefer to get as little of this dust in the air as possible and I do that by using ipa kind of soaks up the dust instead of spraying it everywhere or sucking it up into a vacuum let's see get around the sides here I want to be careful with this don't want to manhandle it too much and knock something out clean the underside of it yep soap and water definitely should have started with soap and water looks really good now though I'm gonna give the hard drive enclosure a thorough scrub inside now I'm gonna give these cables a quick scrub and lastly we have the main board this thing is extremely dirty obviously we still need to clean the thermal compound around both the CPU and gpu as well but we're just going to hit this with the electric duster first because there is so much dust basically everywhere this is going to be super gross here we go oh yeah yeah that was super gross and I've got my Air Filter/Purifier thing on now so if you hear that weird humming in the background that's what it is there's now a ton of dust floating in this room why don't you use a vacuum cleaner Greg well I could use a vacuum yes and I do frequently in between shots like these but I really like the portability of something like this and it's much easier to film with because there's nothing attached to it it's all cordless and I can just suck up the dust later now for the thermal compound atop the processor this is not gonna come up easily yeah this is really bad I expect some pretty sweet temperature drops as a result of repasting this because this stuff is just we're we're literally chipping it away such a long and drawn out process as this when it's so sticky and difficult to work with I'm almost I'm just scraping it up to be honest with you which I don't advise if you're not comfortable working around smaller SMDs-(Surface Mounted Devices) if you don't have steady hands it's probably not something worth your time. Just want to clear off as much of the crusty compound as you can off of the dies it's these shiny mirror-like finishes here on these chips and once you've got these cleaned off you don't have to worry about the stuff surrounding it as long as it's not conductive, you can just apply a new Thermal Compound and be good to go the CPU on the other hand cleaned up a bit nicer considering there's only one die next thing's just a bit easier to maneuver around and there are larger SMDs-(Surface Mounted Devices) on here so I'm not as worried about chipping those and knocking them away looks pretty clean NICEEEEEEE we can take the time while we're here to clean these ports this HDMI port and we've got a few others around it got the RJ45 port over here and USB on top of it we'll also clean the housings and we're going to give the main board a good once-over with IPA-(Rubbing Alcohol) and Q-tips not going at it too hard obviously I don't want to pry up any of these SMDs-(Surface Mounted Devices) and it is possible to do with Q-tips, but I am being aggressive enough to the point where the dust that is still lingering behind even after hitting it with that electric duster is being picked up there's a lot of it's still trapped on these larger capacitors and diodes and things so you want to be real careful when you're going in between them you can see they're kind of loose you don't want to hit them too hard you could dislodge them you don't want to have to re-solder anything if you can help it ask me how I know (I'm telling Louis Rossmann about your sad skills Greg) just a couple more spots to go and then we'll try to get the rest of this IPA-(Rubbing Alcohol) to evaporate with the electric duster and then we can start reassembling Yeauhhh this looks so much better check that out and fast forward a bit to a deep-cleaned office everything is ready for a reassembly we're going to start first of course with the main board we're going to get some new thermal compound on here courtesy of Thermal Grizzly I use their stuff all the time they're not a sponsor this video but I do want to give them a shout out because they make really good stuff and this Kryonaut here is some of the best thermal paste I've ever used so we're going to use this and apply it to both the CPU and GPU and then we're going to get these heat sinks fitted, we'll get the fans installed in the chassis and then we'll mate the main board to the chassis so thermal compound going on a little bit there on some here and then a bit more over here on the CPU side I want to make sure all this is covered once we get the heat sink on here or both of them actually there's two heat sinks there we go looking mighty fine and I actually realized I put the thermal pads in the wrong places so we actually need to cool these four chips here and with the thermal pads these will make contact with the chassis and the chassis acts essentially is one large heat sink so that's kind of the purpose here. Now for those wondering, the way I clean these thermal pads because I don't have replacements for these these are thicker kind of jelly or spongier ones I just very lightly scrub them with IPA and q-tips you want to be very careful because you can end up destroying the thermal pad in question if you're too aggressive with it and you can see the job isn't perfect but they still look much cleaner than they did when we first took this apart so this should just slot in like so and then kind of gotta pry it into place nice that was pretty easy now we're ready for the merge we'll mine this fan cable here move it out of the way and things should just slide in like so be careful not to scratch anything **SHEESHHH** definitely definitely a tight fit we'll go ahead and connect this fan cable while we're here it is a tight squeeze there we go we can get this cover on here that will channel air actually flip it around this just kind of just kind of sits here it clips in in one place and I think that's it I think it's held in by the shell screws a bit later in this reinstall process I think that's yeah that's it right there and also take this time to fasten the heat sink screws and now that we're finished with this we can move on to peripherals the optical drive is up next and this should just slot in perfectly there we go and this will be tightened down again with the shell screws later and we've got power and data cables wired in nice next we'll take care of the power board it connects right here so we'll go ahead and slide it in and then the first of the three screws oh if I can get this in there it goes first are the three screws right here and this will actually be covered up by the plastic diffuser for the LEDs that surround the power button so if you see the red ring of death or even just the green lights that's where this comes from so this will just clip on I think this side is up like so and then we can lock the rest of the board in with the two remaining torx screws on the corners now we can get the top cover installed should just slide on like so I'm a tad bit forgetful about what I'm supposed to do here I think is it going like that I think that's it I really hope this turns on wouldn't that suck if it didn't this remover button needs to be installed so get this blue section in first and then do a few test clicks working just fine and now we can get the remaining sides installed so we'll get the large this is actually the bottom side if you lay your console down flat so this will clip in to be careful where this is lining up that looks good and then we'll get oh gosh which side is which so the hard drive is on top all right that's it yeah I think everything else is good to go let me get this hard disk drive installed fairly straightforward all right now is it the other way it's the other way around nice this hard drive actually looks like it's from an original XBOX 360. Now, I think of it it doesn't match the rest of the console... anyway there she is now it's time for the moment of truth see if this thing powers on sounds good it's a good sign yeah we get the LED lights up front and we get the POST that's good news everything works we assembled it correctly and I imagine it's going to run a lot quieter now that we've deep cleaned it and replaced the thermal paste which that really needed to be on the heck if we did nothing else replacing the thermal paste alone probably saved us 5 to 10 degrees celsius in load temps not even kidding well we did it another episode of GCDC in the books this one turned out very nice unfortunately there's not much you can see on the outside again it's an older console so the scratches and the deep blemishes and discolorations I really can't get rid of those especially on a black chassis like this white there are some things you can do especially if it's like turned a yellow color white tends to do that with time so there are ways to correct that but with black and then there's some weird etchings and things especially on the back of this one that I just can't get rid of that said everything else dust wise in here has been evacuated it should be much cleaner inside you guys saw the earlier shots when we were reassembling it's just a night and day difference and it's no longer going to be a home for cockroaches which that's that's always nice right with that if you guys enjoyed this video be sure to let me know by SMASHING that like button and Subscribing if you have not already if you want to find any of the gear we use to deconstruct this console and deep clean it it's all in the video description tied to amazon and maybe newegg affiliate links it depends but that support goes a long way for us we get pennies on the dollar when you buy things through those links but it does add up over time and helps us continue doing what we do. Now if you have a super nasty console and you live in and around the Orlando Florida area be sure to click the link in this video's description to take you to a form you can fill out to sign up to have your system clean and we do it for free at no charge at all and if you like the way that this looks and you again qualify we can take care of your console as well it doesn't matter how old it is as long as it's a console kind of like this it could be you know as old as nes it could be as new as a PS4 even PS4 Pro, PS5 I'd be willing to work on a PS5 if you trust me enough and look obviously if I screw something up myself I'm going to cover you I'm either going to buy you a new console outright or I'll buy the replacement components to make sure that you're taken care of but I've been very careful I learned from the first episode and I've been really trying to take my time when it comes to disassembling these to make sure that everything is in working order once it's all reassembled again with that yeah like, subscribe the stuff I just said support us in the descriptions and leave a comment let me know what kind of console you want to see next here in the GCDC playlist my name is Greg thanks for Deep-Cleaning with me!

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 184,559

Keywords: how to clean an xbox 360, how to clean, xbox 360, restoring xbox 360, pc gaming, computer, how to build a pc, roach infested xbox, roach infested, gaming pc, gcdc, console, dirty console, nasty console, tech, xbox how to clean an xbox, dirty xbox 360, deep cleaning, how to, nasty pc, disgusting xbox, How to clean an xbox

Id: 1oRRtI2_wCQ

Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021