TronicsFix Couldn't Fix This PS4... Can We Do Any Better? TronicsFix Vs TheCod3r Repair Challenge!

hey everyone welcome to a very special repair video a few weeks ago steve from tonic fix attempted to fix a playstation 4 motherboard and unfortunately couldn't fix it because he found that one of the ram ics was 48 on the board fortunately he sent that board to me and i have that board right here i've had this board for a couple of days now and i've been very tempted to open it but i thought i'd open it on video and bring you all along on the journey i just want to give a massive shout out to steve from tronixfix and say a big thank you for giving me this opportunity hopefully fingers crossed we can get it working let's get this open and let's see what we can do with it shall we okay so the first thing i'm going to need to do is of course get this thing open so let's do that now so i've been itching to get into this for quite a while now to be honest and uh yeah i just haven't gotten down to getting to a point where i can actually take a look at this so this has come all the way from the united states obviously we live in the united kingdom uh but this has come all the way from the united states and once again i want to thank steve for giving me this opportunity just to recap then while i'm on packaging this basically this motherboard steve attempted to repair on on a video along with several others and i'll link into that video down below and unfortunately this one he found that there was a short on the run so he offered to send it to a small youtuber and several people recommended me and i'd like to thank everyone who did recommend me because this is giving me a great opportunity to not only show that you know sometimes something that one technician can't do another technician can um but also the fact that this is going to help me to build a relationship with other youtubers and i really appreciate that and you know it's it's given me an opportunity to learn and also to grow at the same time so it's quite exciting really very well packaged almost admit hopefully survive the trip all right here we go oh okay right so let's just get this packaging out of the way and i'll show you one thing that i'm noticing straight away actually so i'll just took that to one side because i'm a messy technician and one thing i'm noticing straight away is that there's a burn mark on this so this might be really interesting to see what's actually going on so you can see just here there's a burn mark there so right away that's one thing i'm noticing so i'm assuming now i've it's been a while since i've watched the video it's been about four weeks i think so it's been quite a while i'm assuming oh yeah it's that one there ah okay yeah right okay so this is the ram i see that steve has removed okay so that's why he'd take that to there all right well that saves me a bit a little bit of time i guess so yeah so basically let me just explain what i need to do so the first thing i'm going to need to do is i'm going to need to get a donor board and if you don't know what a donor board is it's essentially a board that is basically dead and i'm going to need to take another ram cheap off the donor board so one of the ram trips off the donor board will need to take off i need to replace the solder balls underneath so if we take a look at that chip there we can see that we've got quite a few solder balls i believe there's 180 balls on these particular ics and they are 0.45 millimeters in size so we basically replace the solder balls that are on there and by doing that we can basically reuse that chip now the reason that steve wasn't able to do this or sorry i'll rephrase that didn't want to do this was because it can be a quality time consuming process and you might not end up with a working board at the end of it so what could happen potentially is i could reball this ic or reball another oc install that oc onto this board and then it could have another fault and then it gets to a point of where it's probably not worth fixing for a normal technician now i'm just fixing this for the sake of fixing it so i will go above and beyond to get this working i i accept that challenge and i'm going to go b above and beyond to get this working so i believe that this had a long pulsing blue light of death and i do have several videos on the channel where in the past i've had a long pulsing blue light of death and it turns out to be a faulty ram i see the reason that these ramoi series go bad is pretty unknown uh this one has obviously had some sort of a very big short on it as indicated by the very visible burn marks on both sides of the board so the burn marks out of here and the burn mark that is here that is not going to be down to the removal of the chip and the reason i know that is because it's traveled through to the other side so this has got very very hot in a short short period of time and that's one way that we generally know when we've got a short on the ram obviously i can't test this until i reinstall that ram so i'm going to get a donor board i'll remove and run the rc off there reball it prepare this board get it ready and then we'll get it installed right so here i have a beautiful looking donut this is an sad 0 002 model so this is the ps4 slim but as you can see i've got quite a few ram ics here to pick from and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to take one or two off i might take the two off uh just in case i mess the first one up and basically i'll get the i'll get the ram ics rebald get it ready to install onto here and then i'll start preparing this board so the first thing i'm going to need to do then is i'm going to need to remove one of these chips so i'm going to set up the microscope we'll take a look under the microscope i'll walk through how i'm going to remove the ic and then i'll walk through how i'm going to re-boil it as well the first thing that we're going to need to do with this is add a little bit of flux and flux is going to help the solder to flow so basically we want to help the solder to flow so as it doesn't basically get stuck and the solder flows evenly and allows us to remove it without damaging the traces on the ic itself it doesn't matter if we damage the traces on the board for this particular board and the reason for that is because like i said this is a domino board so this board is never going to work again this has had so many things removed off it though it's got no chance and we just had a nice bead of flux all the way around and then i'm going to take my hot air station so the hot air station that i use is an atom st 862d i'm going to set the hot air to 440 degrees celsius i'm going to set my airflow to 20 and i'm going to get this removed so i'm going to start coming in from quite a distance and it's going to be around about four inches away from the ic itself just to get some heat in the general area and get this chip removed as safely as possible we can of course use the bga rework station but i do i do understand that a lot of people are not going to have a bga rework station which is why i'm not using it for this particular repair because this is it's not an easy repair but it's also not a cheap repair when you factor in the the fact that you've got to have a vga rework station so i'm doing it with hot air just to prove it can be done using normal hot air so what i want to do is i want to put some heat in this board and try and distribute the heat as evenly as i possibly can and the reason for that is because this is a ram i see and they are sensitive to heat so i don't want to overheat it too quickly because i don't want to damage it this is going to be going on to the board that i'm working on okay and that chip has moved so i'm going to give it another few seconds and then just lift the ic off the board so there is one ic removed and ready for reboiling but while there's still some heat in the board i'm going to remove another obc just in case i messed the first one up so i'm going to do the same again with this one okay and you can see that chip moving so let's just lift the chip off and done so with that out of the way i can now move this down aboard we don't need that anymore so we can get rid of that and as you can see here i now have two hopefully good ics which i can reball and pop one of them onto the ps4 board that we're working on right so what i need to do next is i need to prepare this motherboard for the new chip because we're not gonna be able to install the new chip as it as it stands right now so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna replace the solder that's on here at the moment so this solder that's here i'm going to replace with lady solder and that's going to lower the melting temperature to melt that solder and then i'm going to wick it away using solder blade so here's the motherboard that steve sent over first thing i want to do is just apply some flux while while my soldering iron is preheating so there's some flux still on there from when steve removed the cheap but that's not a problem i can clean that off afterwards and then take some leaded solder get a nice board of it on the tip of the iron and then just go around in a nice circle so the next step is going to be to take a little bit of solder braid run the soldering iron across and just clean up all of this solder and you'll see this solder will suck up onto the wick and clean off the pads for us and we may have a torn trace let's make sure those pads are nice and clean the next thing i need to do is just give the board a nice clean so i'm going to get some heat in the board because when the flux goes dry it basically hardens and by putting a bit of heat into it it's going to allow me to clean off the board a lot easier so i'll just use a bit of hot air and just put some heat in the general area and then i'm going to use some isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab i'm just going to keep on cleaning until all of the burnt flux is gone and we have a nice working area to replace the chip so let's zoom in there and let's inspect the area and i believe we just have the one torn trace however if we take a look at that particular trace that trace always comes off and the reason for that is because it's not connected anywhere so we can see here that we've got this trace here for example and that goes to this point here so that goes to what's called a via or a voya and a voya is essentially a pathway to another layer on the board in this case it's probably going all the way through to the other side of the board and you can clearly see that this is connected here but this one just here there's no fire and the reason for that is because it's a not connected pin or not connected pad so we don't actually need that pad to be present in order to get this working so with that done you can see that this board is pretty much prepared and ready to go now so all we need to do is get this chip rebuild and then we can pop a new chip onto here and hopefully fingers crossed we're going to get it working so the next thing i need to do is i need to do pretty much the same as what i did with the board but on the chip i need to prepare the chip so as it's ready to accept new solder balls and then ready to be installed onto the motherboard so i need to replace the solder that's on the chip with leaded solder that's again going to reduce the melting temperature and then i need to wick all of that solder away clean off the chip nice and flat and then we can do a re-ball get all the balls replaced and fingers crossed we can get it working so this device here is called a reballing jig and what this does is it allows me to secure the tip in one fixed position to be able to re-ball it successfully without the tip moving around because we don't want the chip to move around we need every single solder ball to be perfectly aligned and in the correct position we don't want two balls on one pad we don't want a missing ball and we don't want any balls to be out of alignment as well because it's not going to adhere to the motherboard in the correct location so we installed the chip into a reporting jig and that's going to allow us to reboil it successfully or hopefully reboil it successfully let's just move that one out of the way that's sticking around but it's going to allow us to rebuild this successfully and basically get the chip ready to be installed onto the board so i'll just grab that back out of there it's a little bit the wrong size so what we need to do is just adjust the size of the jig to the right size for the chip so let's just lock that into position there we go and now as you can see that's nice and solid so that's not going nowhere the flat tip isn't going anywhere in there which means i can reball this properly without having to worry about it moving around so like i said what i'm going to do is i'm going to add some flux to the ic and then i'm going to replace the solder that's on there again with some more freshly solder and once again i'm not going to put any pressure on the chip i don't want to damage the pads so i'm going to add a ball of solder onto the tip of the iron and then just go around in a circular motion very very lightly same for this side there we go let's clean off the tip of the iron let's get a fresh piece of wick so just cut a little bit of that away and then just wick away at the chip itself awesome so that should be nice and clean underneath all of the burnt flux let's just give that a clean with some isopropyl alcohol once again so a little bit of isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab should be all we need to make sure that's nice and clean and then i want to inspect it under the microscope and make sure that we don't have any kind of bumps or anything anything that's going to cause us a problem when we're trying to reball the chip and as you can see that looks pretty spot on perfect so that should be absolutely fine for me boiling all right so the next thing we need to do is we need to put some new solder balls on this chip now i don't currently own a stencil for the playstation for them because the playstation 4 ram is different to normal ram i do have a stencil for normal run which has only got three rolls but this one has got five there's 180 balls in total and they are 0.45 millimeter solder balls which is why we have to do this underneath a microscope because they are just far too small to do it by eye so the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to add a layer of flux i really don't need much here just a nice even coating so just wipe it across with my finger and that is still too much so i'm going to wipe a bit more away and now you can see we've got a nice even coat in there and what what that's for is to allow the solder balls to basically stick in place as i'm moving them with a pair of tweezers so because i don't have a stencil i need to do this by hand and i've done this many times before it is a lengthy process but you can get fairly proficient at it and you can get it pretty accurate as well and what i'm going to do now is just drop a bunch of solder balls out of the tub onto the chip it doesn't matter if we've got too much but we want to ideally get more than we need and the reason for that is because once we get so far down we're not going to be able to add any more balls onto the chip because i'll just fly everywhere and knock all the ones that we've already put in position out the way so we add more than we need and then just split them up evenly and that's going to allow us to re-ball this chip by hand without the use of a stencil and now what i'll do is just zoom in so as we can see it very closely and basically just start to position all of these balls onto the chip so i will probably fast forward through a lot of this but i just want to show you how we actually do it so this is a very time consuming process and just take a little bit of a while before you start to get into a nice rhythm but basically all we're doing is just positioning these balls by hand onto the shoulder pads so with this one ball on each pad you might find that some of them won't quite sit on that doesn't really matter too much that can be out of line slightly you just don't want them too far out of line and the reason for that is because when we apply hot air to melt the solder balls we don't want them to blow away we don't want them to merge and we don't want them to basically have one or two pads where there's no ball at all so as closely to being lined up as possible and you'll notice occasion that the solder ball will probably stick to the tweezers or to whatever you're using and if it does don't worry just wipe away the tweezers these solder balls you know you can buy twelve and a half thousand of them for a couple of pound on aliexpress they're very very cheap um when there's only 180 balls on each of these chips you can do quite a lot with that 12 and a half thousand so don't worry if you waste a few okay and as you can see we are fifty percent of the way done so that took around about four minutes for me but i'm not sure how long it would take you i think the first time i ever done this it took me a lot longer than four minutes probably more like 40 minutes to do um a full chip and now it takes me around about 10 to 15 minutes to do the full tip so uh you do get used to it for sure you do get used to it okay so sometimes you'll notice that some of the balls will bunch up and the best thing to do there is just move them out of the way you don't need as many balls as you put on so just push a few out of the way push them off to the side push them off into the middle uh whichever you feel more comfortable with i'll just generally just nudge them out the way we are around about two thirds done all right so now i'm getting close to the end i'm just going to start pushing a fair few solar balls out of the way and completely off the chip reason for that is because i don't really want that many balls on the chip now i know that i'm going to have more than enough so i might as well just move some one little thing i do need to say is if you put them on the chip and the flux nearby or even if you took them out of the bottle that they came in don't reuse them once you've moved them off the chip and started to move them away and the reason for that is because they're going to be sticky it's going to cause the rest of the balls inside the tub to go sticky and you don't want that you want the solder balls to be as clean as you could possibly can get them and one thing you'll notice here i've just messed up a little bit uh by knocking a couple of those balls out of the way but not gonna panic just gonna carry on realign them so that's one issue you face with putting too much balls on okay that's one ball on every pad so i'm going to give it a final clean up now so what i'm going to do now is i'm just going to move some of these solder balls out of the way very carefully trying not to knock any of the balls that i've already placed on there whoops just like that so i'll just push the rest off to the side we don't want any extra balls on the chip other than what need to be there because the hot air will blow them towards other balls if that means picking them up one by one then that means picking them up one by one okay so this looks fairly close to being lined up so what i'm going to do now is apply some hot air and flow all of these solder balls onto the pads so as they're all stuck down and then i'll use some flux reflow them and that should align perfectly with the pads on the chip so for this process we want as low of an airflow as we possibly can so what i use is five percent airflow and 420 degrees celsius the solder balls don't need that much heat to actually start to melt because it's a very very small mass on the ball itself so they melt quite quickly so 420 degrees with five percent airflow so that's a very very low airflow and the lower the better relay because we don't want to blow anything out of the way and i'm going to start coming in from a distance and what you're going to notice is that some of the balls are going to start to move and i wouldn't panic on this part because as the flux starts to melt some of the balls are going to move and that's why we wanted them as close to being in line as we possibly can so as they don't start to merge with the other balls and cause us to have uneven sized balls so i'm coming from a distance and you're gonna start to see it dry up and we're gonna watch very closely so we're gonna watch every single ball closely and eventually what you're going to notice is that every ball will start to be pretty much perfectly aligned with its respective pad as they start to melt so keep a close eye on the balls especially the ones in the corner because that's the ones that tend to merge more because that's where the flux tends to puddle up a little bit i would say judging by the fact that none of them have merged already we're probably safe to come in a bit closer okay so you can see that the balls have started to line up a lot better on that one side so i don't see any balls really that i should be concerned about there so i'm going to increase the airflow to 10 percent i'm gonna start moving air around okay we can see that some of those balls are starting to cause a problem on the top there so there's a couple of balls there which i need to adjust so be very careful if you're doing this process because it is very hot but we do not want these two balls here to merge it's not the end of the world if they do merge but we just don't want them to of course now the problem is the flux underneath the chip is melted so it's causing an issue so what i'm going to do then because those balls appear to be fairly well stuck i'm going to add some flux and i'm going to pay close attention to that one particular area and when the balls start to become a little bit more molten i'm going to nudge them manually with my tweezers so i'll add a little bit of flux and you can see there that quite a few of them balls was not stuck on top not a problem i'll add them afterwards so the way i'll deal with that is just to remove them so any balls that are not stuck now i'm just going to remove so i should be fine so let's come back in with the hot air then uh nope those balls need to be replaced never mind i can whip those away afterwards it's not a big deal i can whip them away and replace them i'll increase the airflow negative 20 i can fix the rest of those balls manually okay increase the airflow another five percent okay and this right here is a perfect example of why you don't want to solder balls too close together so in a way i'm kind of glad that happened because it means i can show you what happens when they are too close together so if we take a closer look here we can see that we've got two solder balls here which have merged and the reason for this is because like i said the balls are too close together and that caused them to join together as one big ball so what we need to do with this is we need to basically wick it away and get rid of pretty much an entire area probably six or eight balls so we'll do it in as small of a group as possible but we need to remove those merged merged balls and we're going to hit all the balls as we do it so we're going to use a soldering iron with some wick like we did earlier on however the easiest thing to do is probably to take an entire section out and now i want to clean the chip off so the way i'm going to clean the chip off while the solder balls on there is to use some isopropyl alcohol with a toothbrush that's going to allow me to clean all of the flux from in the small little gaps and then i'm going to need to basically do the process again but just on a lot smaller field and as you can see we've got a few balls which we need to do so not many but we've got a few but if we look at the other side that other side is pretty much perfect so we've got one solder ball which is still not cracked but it's a little bit deformed and the reason for that is because a little bit of flux didn't go on that one particular solder ball so that's why we stress the importance of using flux because otherwise you end up with out of shape balls and outer shape solder cracks in the solder things like that so we need we need to get the other side exactly the same as this side because otherwise these pads won't make a connection so all we need to do to be able to do that is to basically do the same process again but like i said just on a much smaller scale so as we can see here we now have a perfectly reball chip and it took a little bit longer than it normally would but it doesn't really matter it's uh obviously this this repair is not for any kind of uh monetary value or anything you need just for the sake of trying to get it repaired so i don't mind spending a bit longer on this but all of those balls look nice and even so we should be ready to get this installed and the way i'm going to do that is first of all i'm going to add a layer of flux over the pads so we want a nice thin layer to start with we can add more flux later on let's add a thin layer of flux and then we need to line up the chip so as it's in line with the solder balls on the actual board itself so we're going to line up the chip with pin one in the correct location the way to determine that is to look for an indicator on the board in this case there's a little dot just here in the bottom right hand corner and we will line that up with the dot that's on the chip so that's on the bottom right hand side of this chip and then because we can't actually see under the chip there are some outlines here so there's an outline here an outline here and then there's some outlines on the other side as well but one way we can do it is to get it roughly in position we'll feel it lock into place so we'll feel the balls sit on top of the pad just like that whoops that's a bit uh out of line there so you can see that's barely moving as i'm nudging it with my fingers unless i nudge it really hard so that chip feels like it's in place to me it's not really moving at all now so what i want to do is i want to lift my finger off this chip but the problem is my finger's now going to be stuck to it so i'm going to grab a pair of tweezers press down on the chip lightly pull my finger away and then pull the chip away and that's gonna allow me to release the chip without moving it out of place so that's gonna stay roughly in position now but we can double check it does look like it's a little bit slanted but a tiny bit slanted isn't really going to hurt it too much but we can adjust it if we feel like he's not quite in place and i do feel like this isn't perfect so i'm just going to give it a very gentle tap there we go and that looks like it's sitting nicely now in all four corners and now i'm going to knock my airflow down to 10 percent so a fairly low airflow 450 degrees celsius heat and basically just solder this chip on using hot air i'm going to circulate the heat as best i can of course we don't have that much working distance between the top of the microscope and the board itself so it's kind of difficult to get a good angle but once i feel like the cheap he's going to be sort of tacked down so sort of locked into place i can add more flux increase the airflow and solder it properly until i feel like it's soldered onto the board uh let's find out if these gp soldered okay that's locked into place but i want to reflow it now so as the entire chip is soldered properly so what i'll do now to make sure that it's soldered properly i'm going to add some more flux and i'm going to reflow it properly so i've moved the microscope out of the way so i can get a better angle doesn't matter how much flux i had now and i'm just going to reflow it fully and then i'm just going to give the chip a tap on the corner make sure it springs back into place a very light tap and that's soldered so now we need to let the board cool down for a couple of minutes and then clean off the board get it into a chassis and hopefully this thing's going to work let's cross our fingers on this one so let's clean off the board i'm just using isopropyl alcohol with a [Music] toothbrush and there we go so that should be soldered and as you can see it is the same board so all that's left to do now is find out a chasse find a power supply and see if this thing turns on i've got myself a chasse and a power supply i don't have a disk drive in this thing but that's not really the important thing the important thing is to see if this thing turns on and goes to a white light so fingers crossed we haven't killed the ram i see by reflowing it or by removing it because that can happen so what i need to do then is just clean off the old thermal paste that's on here because like i said this is a used chassis and obviously because of the weight and things involved all i received was the motherboard so i need to put it into one of my own chassis for testing i'm just cleaning off that with a cotton swab there we go all right so let's add some mx4 thermal paste there's half piece size in the center of the chip will do absolutely perfectly let's drop that in there okay let's get ourself a heatsink clamp and we need a few screws all right so they're not the correct screws but all i want to do is see if this works i don't think i have any screws for this particular motherboard for the apu clamp but all i want to do is just see this work so let's cross our fingers and hope on this one because i've been talking a big talk for a few weeks now uh so let's try and get this working shall we let's pop in a power supply there and like i said i'm not concerned about i dis drive i'm not concerned about a hard drive i just want to see it working even if it has no display or something similar to that i just want to see it working then we can worry about getting it fully assembled into a working console uh hope for the best okay that's overheating uh yeah that's overheating because i don't have the correct clamp i'm gonna put some pressure on there so what do you think is it gonna go to a white light so i'm just feeling around the ram nana going incredibly hot we don't have a white light yet that's quite worrying i may need to replace his ram again he could have killed it with all the heat nothing nothing okay well that sucks just a little bit all that work i'll tell you what i'm gonna try if it doesn't work now i'm going to try a reflow on the ipu it could have had some sort of an impact previously uh that could be what was causing the ram to be bad and on top of that it could have also had impact on the ipu itself the good thing is we can reflow because i do have a bga rework station so reflowing the ipu is an option for me so i'm going to do that i'm going to reflow the ipu right so the first thing i need to do to reflow the ipu is just add some flux onto the edges of the chip like we did with the ram but first of all i need to get rid of this thermal paste so i will give you a little disclaimer here in that's that fact that this chip is far too big to ever attempt to reflow with a normal hot air station and i would only attempt this job if you have a proper bgi rework machine the machine that i'll use is an agile pro sc and i've had a lot of success with reflows and what a reflow does is those solder balls that we see underneath the chips it essentially reflows all of those joints and basically rejoins any connections which might be a little bit weak or not making a connection because of warping because of impact or just because of the fact that it led free solder and the lead-free solder does have weaknesses so they could have become uh deformed in some way they could have become crack cracked in some way uh we don't know but it could well be an ipu issue because i've replaced that ram twice and it's not fixed the issue there's no more overheating on that ram it's no longer getting hot which means that ram in theory should be functional i'm not going to say it is functional but in theory it should be functional and one other interesting thing as well is that the i believe this is the uh the playstation camera port i'm not sure but i believe this is the playstation camera port and that is bent so i've got a feeling that this has probably had some sort of an impact in the past uh so that's interesting to note the fact that it's bent alright so let's add a bead of flux all the way around the edge of the chip right so with the rework station set up we're ready to drop the motherboard onto the top of the plate and there's the board there as you can see it is still the same board so what we're going to do with this then is we're going to reflow the ipu and what that means is like i said we're going to re-melt all of the solder balls that are underneath the chip itself and by doing that hopefully we're going to reform all of those connections and hopefully fix this machine because the ram is absolutely fine and i believe steve has already done several diagnostics on this and the only thing he found wrong with it was the ram so that's pretty much pretty much all we can do apart from attempting an ipu reflow now i will stress that this is probably a last resort and i wouldn't recommend doing this if you're obviously not experienced with this sort of thing i do reflows and reballs pretty much every week at least two to three times a week usually so i'm really used to this but you know if you've never done this sort of thing before then i wouldn't recommend it but basically what we're going to be doing is we're going to gradually heat up the motherboard so there's two plates on this there's the top plate and the bottom plate this is obviously the bottom plate and then we've got a top plate on this thing here and you'll notice that the top plate is in kind of a square shape or rather it is a square shape and it's a perfect size for the ipu and what we do is we heat up the bottom plate to 220 degrees as you can see by the bottom plate just here so 220 degrees the bottom plate is set to and then once the bottom plate has got to 220 the top plate will kick in and that will gradually increase to 100 degrees celsius when it gets to 100 degrees celsius it will hold there for about 30 seconds and allow the rest of the board to cut up and then it will slowly increase until the top plate temperature gets to 220 degrees celsius and it'll stop along the way so at 140 degrees it will stop 160 it will stop again 180 will stop again 200 it will stop again 210 220 and then it will hold on 230 until i hit stop we don't need it to reach 230 degrees usually by the time it reaches 200 i can stop the process and the reflow is complete but obviously by allowing it to go to 230 or cover myself in any eventuality because the temperature outside the temperature inside everything makes a difference so fingers crossed we can get this thing reflowed so i'm going to hit start and you'll see that the bottom plate will start to kick in and slowly increasing 21 degrees 22 23 and so on and so forth so i'm going to let this profile run and i'll obviously fast forward through this because this takes around about eight minutes i'll resume the video when it gets close to being time to actually reflow the chip so what we'll do is when it gets up to temperature and we feel like it's ready we'll start nudging the tip with a pair of tweezers or something and when we nudge the chip and the chip moves put springs back into place then the reflow is complete surface tension will keep that chip in its correct position and it will basically reform all of the solder balls so we'll let this profile run let the machine do its thing and we'll carry on in a moment and that is reflowed so i pressed stop on the heating process there i moved the top plate away from the apu to prevent it from heating up anymore because even though i've stopped it that top plate is still hot so i want to allow this to cool down naturally now and the reason for that is relatively simple if i was to cool this down any of them in by any other means other than naturally so for example if i was to hit the fan on the bottom plate then there's a good chance that we can cause the solder balls underneath the ipu as well as the rest of the board to go into what's called thermal shock and what can happen there is it can damage traces it can damage the balls underneath the apu it can cause warping uh it can cause all sorts of havoc on the motherboard so we don't really don't want to be doing that kind of thing so we're going to let it cool down naturally until the bottom plate reports around about 100 degrees celsius so right now you can see that the temperature is gradually decreasing and when that bottom plate heats around about 120 to 100 degrees celsius then i can heat the bottom fan and assist in cooling so what you saw there was me giving the cheaper tap like we would tap any other chip and the chips run back into place so it was only a very light tap but this chip sprung back into place and what that means is that every solder ball was melted and that the chip was reflowed successfully now i will warn you as well that this process can of course kill the machine completely it can cause popcorning on the chip which is where the top layer will separate from the rest of the layers and cause damage to the ipu it can completely write off the ap you can full stop or it can cause other damage to the internals of the motherboard as well such as damage on another layer that's possibly weak or you know got some sort of a defect on it so basically the reason i've reflowed this is because it's kind of a lost cause at the moment and reflowing is pretty much the last option if it don't work then you know we haven't lost anything but time and if it does work then absolutely fantastic i do have a fairly high success rate when it comes to reflowing and i would say it's around about the 70 mark where i'll get around about seven out of 10 successful reflows around about three out of ten are either unsuccessful where they just don't change the situation or where it turns to a complete null power or a two second blue light of death where basically solar balls for some reason have merged underneath the ipu if it goes to a two second blue light to death it's not the end of the world we can reflow it again sometimes that fixes it and we can also re-ball it as well so we can get a proper reboiling stencil and reball the entire ipu which is about 1500 solar balls so it's not it's not one of those that you can do by hand like i did on the ram chips because there's a lot more solar walls they're a lot closer together and it's just a lot more awkward overall i have done it once on a ps4 pro but never again never again would i be reball an apu on a ps4 not by hand so i'll let this call down naturally and then we'll get it off the rework machine and back onto the bench and hopefully it fixes the problem all right so this is about cooling off now where i can work on it safely and what i need to do first is just give the board a good clean because there's a lot of burnt flux around here now and we obviously don't want to leave that kind of stuff so all i do for that is just pour a load of isopropyl alcohol onto the board let's give it a proper clean and there goes that leftover thermal paste i believe that was the thermal place that was left on from before i didn't clean it properly uh not a big deal but never mind and the one plus about this is that it's going to teach people the process of bgi rework so whether or not i get this working you know it's not a loss either way the video will get posted but uh it's not a complete loss if i don't get it working because it does teach people the process of vj rework and it gets more people possibly interested in bj rework so you know hopefully it's at least helped a few people i'm not optimistic about it to be honest uh it's looking a little bit bleaker every time i do something to it but you never know i've been surprised before i've been surprised before i've got quite a few videos on the channel where i've been absolutely shocked uh because i thought something wasn't going to fix the issue and it has and i've just tried it out to pure desperation if i'm honest uh you know not all repairs are scientific stuff it's not always scientific stuff sometimes it's just trying to look um and these are it's more of an educated guess than anything especially when you you know when you're working on these every single day you take educated guesses you don't guess and just hope that you can fix it but you take educated guesses and hope that fixes it not all repairs are simple and straightforward but this is kind of a last hope okay so that's clean enough for testing i think not completely clean but it's clean enough for testing what we do need though is some more thermal paste let's get some more mx4 i'm pretty sure steve will tell me if that's a perfect amount of thermal paste okay so my bench is absolute state but uh again part of the process let's clean off the rest of the console let's get rid of this thermal paste as well because otherwise it won't be the perfect amount all right that will do let's hit and hope and pray that it works so we've got some flux and stuff on the back i'm not bothered about that and i'll tell you what i will do i think if this goes to a two second blue light of death i'll reboot it i'll do a proper v-ball why not just for the funds so right now we're coming up to three and a half hours of working on this so i would say another area and a half won't hurt on a v-ball should i need to all right definitely um i think the chassis is damaged to be honest i'm not sure but i think the chassis is damaged because the screws just don't bite there we go moment of truth well we don't have a two second blue light of death so it's either going to work or it's not and a reball won't help because it's not gone to a two second blue light of death unless there's trace damage but a rebal won't help that's going gonna go to a white light ladies and gents that fan just stopped and started that's gonna go to a white light come on show me yes let's go oh yes let's go oh wow i am so happy that was a clutching at straws moment and it worked oh wow yes and i know for a fact there's going to be people in this in the comments section saying how did i know it was going to go to a white light wow that is unbelievable this console has come all the way from america it's gone through so much along the way and it's working do we have a display let me switch over to my capture card yes we do yes we do that is fantastic i've got to sit here and hold this apu in place because i don't have the correct screws but that is fantastic oh that is awesome i need a hard drive wow i'm so happy right i need my test solid state drive uh okay my bench is such a mess i don't know where the test solid state drive is let's forget the solid state drive let's just use this i honestly don't know where my ssds have gone i've got a test ssd for the ps4 and one for the xbox i don't know where they've gone i can't believe that's happened i can't believe that worked well i can in a way i can believe it but that's absolutely brilliant such a fantastic end okay so while i'm sorting this out while i'm getting this uh ssd out of here you're probably wondering how i knew that was going to go to a white light and i say this all the time while i'm live streaming and the fact is i know it was going to go to a white light because the fan stopped spinning and then started again there's certain things that we need to look out for when we're working with the blue light of death system and i do these all the time i work on these every week like i said um there's certain things we need to look out for when we're working with the blue light of death system and on the original ps4 the 1000 series uh the power supply relay will click just before it goes to a white light on the 1200 series and onwards the fan will stop spinning and it will go to a white light just after it restarts the fan um it's one of them things i've picked up along the way i know this is a bit ghetto but please just just allow this just to layer this moment it's a little bit ghetto or just allow it okay let's start it back up let's start it back up this is fantastic let's get that white light again shall we there we go there we go okay we're on there in safe mode so what i need to do now to complete this is i need the system software steve said he's had this console for a long time and i'm not sure what software is going to be on it but i'm going to download whatever operating system is on it and if that's version one then it's version one that will download um this is absolutely brilliant okay and we need version 5.45 excellent okay so i'm going to pop in at the usb and then i'm going to press ok hopefully i don't need to find a disk drive out but the renaissance ic is on the motherboard on these particular models so i shouldn't need the disk drive although i do sometimes sometimes it doesn't let you do it without the disk drive but we'll give it a whirl and yep that's accepted it so we can press ok and that will install the software and yeah we'll take it from there we'll give it a test uh the one thing i can't test because i don't have one to hand is a disk drive but i can test i can test it to make sure it loads to the dashboard and things and show you this console actually working which is a couple of words that i didn't think i was going to say at one point but it's uh certainly nice to see this console turned on and with a white light that is for sure and this is the moment of truth about to hit a hundred percent just rebooting now updating system storage okay let's run through the setup and let's give this one final test i'm not going to be able to test wi-fi i don't have an antenna and i'm not going to be able to test the disk drive but let's make sure that it views in 1080p and that's pretty much it so very dateful he's going to pick up a wi-fi network oh i'm gone okay so there's a very important message here so the password to my wi-fi has a subliminal message in it and you should really pay attention to that if you're new to the channel because it's a very very important message that is genuinely the password by the way the memes we love it okay let's skip that absolutely shocked that that's even picked up wi-fi but the router is fairly close and where's my time zone it's here somewhere there we are 22nd of the first 2021 it's actually picked up the i think that's the correct date isn't it yeah it really is wow that's quite surprising isn't that a beautiful sight ladies and gents let's test the video output that's on automatic so that's going to be working in 1080p so that's awesome that's absolutely awesome there we go i'll go away there we go excellent absolutely awesome all working i'm having a couple of controller issues here because i don't have a wi-fi card a wi-fi antenna plugged in but that ladies and gents he's all she wrote it's been an absolute joy void uh i've enjoyed every single moment of it and i'm just super super happy that i've managed to get this console working and just to show you that it is still the same console because i know for a fact there's going to be a couple of people in the comments that say that it's been faked somehow because there always is uh but that's one of them things that we have to deal with on youtube but as you can see there it is still exactly the same motherboard uh but just to summarize on this then so this was sent by steve from tronixfix in america and i would again i want to say a big thank you to steve for giving me this opportunity um the console originally came with one of the ram ics removed so that was this thing just here and i had to rebuild the ram i did end up putting a second second ram ic on there just because i didn't know if the first one had gone on okay that obviously didn't fix the issue so i ended up reflowing the apu using my actually ir pro bga rework station like i said it's not something that everyone can do i understand that um and not everyone has a bj rework station in fact probably 95 of technicians won't have one but that's just something that i happen to have which is why it was such a blast to be able to work on this machine because i knew that i can pretty much do anything i want with this thing um but again i want to say a massive thank you to steve from tronicspeaks if you don't know who steve is there'll be a link in the video description uh if you are new to the channel and you like what you see be sure to hit the subscribe button down below and turn on the bell notifications so that you don't miss any future uploads if you do want to support the channel i do also have channel memberships where you can support me and what i do here for as little as 1.99 per month um i know it's preaching a little bit but it does help the channel out a lot uh but that's going to be for this it's been an absolute blast honestly genuinely from the bottom of my heart i want to thank steve from trying speaks and everyone else a big big thank you to everyone but that's gonna be it for now thank you very much for watching until next time see you later bye for now

Channel: TheCod3r

Views: 837,728

Keywords: thecod3r, tronicsfix, unfixable ps4, thecod3r vs tronicsfix, ps4 blod, ps4 blue light of death, ram replacement ps4, ps4 blod fix, #tronicsfix, #thecod3r, #tronicsfixvsthecod3r, ps4 repair challenge, thecod3r ps4 challenge, apu reflow, ps4 reballing, steve tronicsfix, tronicsfix ps4 repair, thecod3r repair challenge, playstation 4 repairs, micro soldering, bga rework, bga reballing, bga reflow, ps4 ram replacement, playstation 4 repair tutorials, soldering tutorial, ps4 wlod

Id: sbyphasGMrA

Length: 69min 2sec (4142 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021