Here's Why The Nintendo Wii Is More Complicated Than It Looks

this is the Nintendo Wii and oddly enough this might be my second-most repaired system alongside the xbox360 some weeks I would repair more Wiis than the 360 however I never really had to repair a board issue on this system so a pretty durable system when it came to the chipset and the board not so much when it came to the audience they targeted and then the disc drive on the front being slot loading with no guard but we'll be getting into that as we take this thing apart instead I kind of like to check this system out inside and maybe take a look at how Nintendo managed to make this system so small because if you look at it compared to systems in that same generation it is it's downright tiny even compared to the previous generation with the Gamecube and the ps2 and the Xbox it's still very small and while the ps2 slim came out and is technically smaller than this that also didn't have a fully loaded disc drive that is completely slot loading I said that had kind of a flip up top that you had to do everything else so today let's take a look at what was probably one of the biggest shifts in terms of Nintendo's marketing strategy and the audience they targeted and probably the most I guess successful console at this point because they won that generation with what's essentially a Gamecube okay now I say it's a Gamecube technically it's not completely a Gamecube see what's weird about the Wii is while it is tactically sharing a similar chipset we really didn't know much information about the Wii Nintendo really never told us about it in fact the only times we got any kind of information about specs in this system were through press leaks or people reverse-engineering x-raying it all kinds of stuff that they could try to do to figure out what was in here because antenna didn't want to say anything about specs because they weren't competing with specs instead they were competing with a controller it looked like this and the mainstream that latched onto it and if you don't believe me the audience that latched onto it was definitely a casual audience look at something like Wii party that outsold games like Twilight Princess and games like Skyward Sword look at we play which outsold games like Animal Crossing and Smash Bros Brawl combined that one actually outsold Mario galaxy and Smash Bros Brawl combined yeah we play did that so it was pretty clear who their audience was so why don't we take this thing apart and I'm going to show you around it and hopefully we can even take a look at the GPU and the CPU something that a lot of people haven't really ever seen before we're gonna attempt to deal in these actually and see what we can find so the first way in is you pretty want to start popping these doors off see back then it actually have full backwards compatibility which was really cool you start at the top and you'll get three of these black screws the front one is much longer than the other two because the front one actually holds the faceplate on on the front as well and it kind of acts to hold on to the top Parkes once you take that off you can see it starts to kind of pop its way out and this will come off and we'll get this full top part off this is where you plug in your GameCube controllers and your GameCube memory cards because it did have full GameCube backwards-compatibility something that they did remove in the later model so if you want a week I definitely recommend getting this model it has the doors that open up and you can you can plug in all of your old your peripherals there for the Gamecube because eventually took it out I know they went to like blue and pink and black models and at that point you just got to check the top to see if if the doors are there because if they're not you're not getting the gamecube backwards compatibility and that's kind of a shame because that was such a cool feature for it this is work you popped your your GameCube game in and it started up in it acted just like a Gamecube which was great a couple of trialing screws because yes we were in in full effect with try wing drivers here and again you guys know this by now probably from watching I don't like trying screwdrivers or screws they're just really annoying a couple of what I guess you could call warranty checks warranty stickers here in the pads you have stickers here they're stickers on the other side but there's no actual warranty sticker that you break that tells them you fit in here in fact if you replace everything as you should and all the screws in the right spots they would never know you even worked on this thing which was weird at the time because I would work on these all the time and I realized after people started bringing them in and taking them home that Nintendo would never know that I worked on these things like at all as long as I did everything right put everything back they could Tecla still probably through Nintendo's warranty if they really wanted to but a lot of people just wanted to get it done because the kids wanted to play it for the weekend they don't to wait weeks so they would come in and they would just get it all done there I like to take these stickers by the way when I when I do take them off and actually stick them right next to where I pull them from that way they don't get lost or anything and they stick pretty well so usually I'll go around and as I remove them I'll just pop them right next to it that way you know where it is and it won't go anywhere and they lift back up pretty easily now we work around to the bottom again tons of stickers here we do also have our little battery here that keeps time and whatnot on it that keeps it kind of powered for that once you remove this it'll have it will reset its clock and everything still have to go back in and do that and you pretty much have to do it to get inside of this system because it has the main screw underneath that holds again part of the front faceplate on and it isn't kind of confusing I will admit this to start removing all these screws as they have Phillips they have shorter black Phillips screws at the top they have longer Phillips they have all kinds of different screws just on the outside when we get inside this thing becomes an absolute mess like there are so many screws on a system that is so tiny is the weirdest thing I've ever seen I have no idea why that's the case but again I I guess they wanted to make sure everything was solid inside because it really doesn't break when it comes to the chipset it's mostly just the disk drive okay everything is now out this guy will just pull straight off it is plugged in so that just unplugs that was the only reason it really had this plug here was because if you remember this would actually light up blue on the outside that would happen if you had like a message or something this slot would actually light up blue and I'm only I only saw it happen a couple times if you remember the switch is supposed to have something similar around its home button but we have never really seen that come on unless you plug it into to your PC which was so weird to see that bluetooth module is actually right here at the front that's actually not a bad spot for it because there is a lot of steel inside so they put it as close to the front with the antenna here to connect to your controllers and everything else so it makes sense to have it there where there's no real blockage outside of just plastic which doesn't really mess with the signal at all so that's a good spot for it there and then this guy just saw to pull right apart since we've grabbed everything out of there should just pretty much lift right out and you pretty much open it up just like that and I did actually drop the vent all this was annoying there's a filter in there you can see there's a lot of dust this filter is something you want to clean you can usually just take a paper towel to it and just wipe it off and you'll get a lot of that out there but they did put a filter in right at the bottom here just to try to kind of keep it clean inside and it never works it's still got dusty in here so we have our main shield here this is actually screwed in by those Phillips says that we already removed in fact if you don't remove the Phillips heads and slice just go right there with this guy and here we are we're looking directly at the inside of the system now that's our drive this is the thing that's always a pain but what's really good about this we would call this this is essentially called a dumb drive and I'm gonna explain you what I mean by that the disk drive itself on a 360 or a ps3 they have motherboards that go with the drives right so it's at the bottom and actually what these are a little wider so I can actually switch over to a wider philipson and they have boards that go with the drive and it tells a drive what to do when the motherboard the mainboard is working and that's how it all communicates together but what's really good about the wii you don't need to keep the drive the same across motherboards which was actually really cool because if there was a drive that was malfunctioning we would order a brand new drive right if it's not reading all this stuff because eventually the drive these things got cheaper than the laser itself it was very very weird situation I don't think companies wanted to keep pulling the lasers out because it's real annoyance to do so so you would actually be able to lift this guy up as I just did those four screws this would pop off just like this and it was go to the side and I knew one would come right back on it was very easy and it worked well you wouldn't get banned online nothing this and this do not seem to ever be tied together I never experienced that and it worked well just got a new Drive dropped it on the collar of the day it was much easier but if you do want to get inside of this thing this board half the cut has to come off there's a metal shield here this sticker comes off that's your laser right there this has to come up and come out you have your I believe this was your actual arm this is your sensor on top so when you put a disc in it uses like some IR light here to see when the disc is coming in it grabs it pulls it in and then it starts reading that's how old that works and on the bottom here there's actually the spindle that then spins the disc in everything so there's a lot going on here keep that in mind this drive is actually pretty serious and you can kind of see how wide it is in fact most of this system is the disc drive which is really funny this is probably the most complicated part about this whole system is this disk drive and people with Jam all kinds of popsicle sticks DS games trading cards coins you name it I probably took it out of one of these drives good news though if you just have something stuck in here the drive isn't hard to open see you come across here you have Philips head screws all across the top so let's say some trading cards got jammed in here or a DS game a lot of times you'll open this up just like this with these screws on top and it'll lift right up and you can just start grabbing at whatever's in here it's alleged on the side here and then it'll lift up and then you can start getting to whatever you need to so let me actually lift this up and then this kind of just opens up like that you can grab whatever you need to out of there you may have to do a reset on it which is really annoying and it actually involves having to spin this guy until it resets but a lot of times if you get the stuff out you close it back up as always get messed of settings usually it would work fine after that but having to mess with these drives beyond that was such a pain and honestly the disk drives they're probably still online they're probably still really cheap but I remember ordering these disc drives straight up and they were like 23 bucks so you can kind of see why we stopped messing with the drives as much when people were just like yeah drop a new drive in there and let's call it a day it was it was just a million times easier and even now because I know these systems can be mod it's super easy and some people might just want to put a new drive in there after they've modded it right and and just have a brand new drive with a fully modded system because these really are I think one of the best systems to mod in terms of homebrew the homebrew scene around the Wii is still really really good and it's pretty cool to see that now we've had this all done let's take a look around the red the system so you can't understand how the we generates airflow and kind of cools itself off right here is where I don't like going further than this I'm gonna show you why it becomes a nightmare when you start getting inside of this way because we haven't even touched we didn't scratch the surface about getting inside but I told you we're gonna take a look at the GPU and the CPU but at this point you're pretty much good cuz I wouldn't have to go any further than this since most of the work was nothing that drive but on the back we have our fan and the fan would blow air out it would pour out we have actually a very large aluminum finned heat sink here we have our Wi-Fi antennas right here rolling into the system and at that point I would not want to do much more but we're going to because I actually want to show you a big pile of screws when this is all done I want to show you how many screws it actually takes to get the motherboard out of the system ready for this [Music] [Music] yes this is a these are all the screws they end up with here when it's all done all this mess right here is just from getting the smallest system at the time apart yeah it these are just for the board you have those case screws those the clips the stickers everything else over here so you end up with a massive mess I still need unscrew the heatsink and it's it's amazing how much actually went into the way which was originally thought of as being very very simple it's actually an extremely complicated system when you get inside now we have a couple of other accessories here that has to be unplugged that's our Wi-Fi chipset here this actually just comes right off like that it's a plug in so it just pops in I've noticed a few errors take place when this is loose or just completely missing or just off I don't think it can actually boot without this Wi-Fi chips that or at least boot without an error and that's actually reminds me similar to the DS Lite I think that has the same issue where couldn't boot I notice similar issues without this bluetooth module even if the Bluetooth module is on there and it was kicking back an error it would actually prevent the system from starting up front I remember but your Bluetooth module is similar it actually is just a plug in and it just pops right off so that's pretty straightforward as well and actually what's nice is at this point we can start looking at the board after I move all of this stuff out of the way it's it's amazing how much more complicated system is after you get inside from looking at it from the outside let me know if you would have assumed if the we had this much stuff going on just from looking at the outside because they pack this thing full of all kinds of material that I don't think really needed to be there but they added it anyway and getting to these screws in the back is probably the worst we're actually just about done getting all these screws out and we can start looking at the motherboard with the chipset and everything which is nice because that means we're almost done with all that and we have all of our you see this comes off there we go we have our chipsets here where they actually used thermal pads and I don't know if that one was even on correct it was not somehow that end up over there on the incorrect part of the thermal pad which is we're so I just placed moved back so these right here are our two chipsets we have of course two different ones actually I think it'll come off now by the leg sink the screws were through yes that there's the one nice thing about this I'll give them credit for those screws that I was unscrewing there actually go through the board and it has a full metal backplate on the back to kind of keep everything like straight but you can see how much stuff I have now piled up here all over here as well there's stuff everywhere right now just to get this way apart so the good news is we can actually look at our chipsets now yay so I'm gonna give you guys a picture of it here so the system itself the CPU was powerpc-based Broadway processor and that was made on 90 nanometer chipset and apparently is clocked at 729 megahertz we don't really know that's the thing it's a lot of guesstimate sandpeople trying to figure it out then the GPU is a TIA ATI is Hollywood GPU that's also on a 90 nanometer process again reportedly clocked at 243 megahertz we don't really know 100% 88 megabytes of main memory with 24 megabytes so they did kind of split it up 24 megabytes was set up for the graphics pass package and the 64 megabytes was just set up as ddr3 sdram for the system to use so they had an okay process going there definitely a bit of a step up from the GameCube but not a massive step up and now we're gonna attempt I say attempt because we'll see how this goes I've ever actually had to remove the heat spreaders on these and that's gonna be very interesting to see how that goes I have a tool here that I generally use to remove heat spreaders on systems like ps3's so I'm gonna attempt to use it on these two and see if we can actually take a look at what the the chipsets look like so that came off fairly easily I I think I kind of slipped there and hit that this we was actually bricked so I really didn't care - I got it super cheap because it was bricked so I really wasn't planning on it doing much other than this but I think I actually might have hit one of the fuses over here but now you can kind of look to see where because usually there's glue around the edges here and that's generally where you have to cut in and honestly once I cut in on this side it was pretty easy to do it if I had to do it again I probably would have started probably over here in this corner but once it started popping up it was good to go again this thing was bricked and I got super cheap so I wasn't even thinking it like to use it beyond this video but it's an interesting look at that I'm gonna pop this more off too and then we'll get like a really close picture of it so you can see what they look like without the actual heat spreaders on them so you can see this one is actually coming up a bit easier this one I think cuz there's so many spaces started to pop in and everything generally this isn't too bad usually I'll have like a diagram next to me looking to see where any of the important fuses are on top and a lot of times I'll use this for like ps3s and everything those are the first time I really use it on a weave to try to figure it out but this one is actually coming up a bit easier in fact I can basically almost get my fingernail under there too to work it up but I'm gonna keep working around usually I use this just to cut in on the different glue that's underneath and at that point I can usually wiggle it free but again I'm being less careful because I don't care as much about this whe that I wasn't planning on fixing anyway this was more for this video where it's normal it take me a while to work around a ps3 cell CPU this one I don't care about as much I just wanted to see what it looked like this one actually had a fuse underneath that was actually much easier and you can see how small these are I have to give them credit though because probably these didn't generate a ton of heat the compound underneath is still pretty much attacked completely so the we usually had a pretty quiet fan and a lot of Hadoop with probably the heat transfer being pretty solid let me give you a straight picture of these two with the heat spreaders next to them so you can get a good look at them so there's two different chipsets here there's a smaller one which is the CPU and then the large one is that Hollywood GPU and what's interesting about that is it also has an arm 9:26 core which I thought looking at I assume that's that very small daikon in the top right and apparently people have nicknamed its starlet it's unofficial because again the antennae don't really talk much about this but it's designed to really work with things like wireless functionality USB the optical drive just different functions around and keep in mind we also had that wiiconnect24 so when I wouldn't a standby use that arm chipset when it was in a low-power mode because I didn't really want to draw a lot of power however one thing I noticed is whenever it was in that wiiconnect24 when it was kind of off with yellow light it we get very hot so I don't know how good of a job that actually did and that ladies gentlemen is the original way it's much more complicated inside than I think most of us would have assumed just looking at it from the outside and I guess it just goes to show you can't really judge a consultation it up take a look but the we for being the weakest in the generation I think is also one of the most complicated to take apart so there you go the we while again it's not the most powerful is fairly interesting actually inside let me know yes thing about the we after seeing it inside is this something you would have wanted to have worked on back of the day again if you get down to the dried it's not really too hard it's even getting in though there's so many different screws you got it you got a try wing you got a Phillips you get all different sizes but if it's just the drive so if you have something stuck in your drive and it's not operable getting to this point is not too difficult or if your disc drive stops reading changing this drive out with a new one because maybe you've modded it is also very easy to do and you can just literally swap it right out it's it's pretty easy but let me know what you guys think about the Wii thanks guys for watching this you'll like the video if you liked it dislike if not and I'll see you guys in the next video [Music]

Channel: Spawn Wave

Views: 393,670

Keywords: nintendo, nintendo wii, techwave, tech wave, wii disassembly, take apart wii, how to, how to take apart wii, wii disc drive replacement, spawn wave, spawn wave media, wii cpu, wii gpu, hollywood, broadway, delid, delid cpu, wii delid gpu, wii console, wii system, video games, wii specs, ram

Id: 3uWsLG4WGe8

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 19 2018