Unfixable Game Consoles? Let's Find Out! PS4 & Xbox One S Repair

this video is sponsored by jlc pcb my name is steve and i try to fix broken devices to help keep things out of the landfills and today i've got an original ps4 and an xbox one s that i've actually tried to fix before but i've never been successful so today now that i'm older and wiser emphasis on the older i'm gonna try again so this ps4 has the white light of death if you see the white light along here that means the ps4 has fully started up and is ready to display on the tv but if it doesn't display anything on the tv that means there's something wrong with the ps4 this one i've already replaced the port and i think i've already replaced the hdmi chip but we'll see for sure once we get it opened up before we do that though i need to hook it up to my tv and just make sure that's actually what's wrong okay cables are plugged in let's see what happens so right now we just have the flashing blue light that means it's still in its startup sequence and we now have a black screen on the tv it still is pulsing blue okay and here we have solid white on the ps4 with nothing on the screen so that confirms what i've got written down on the sticky note now i need to get it apart and see what it looks like on the inside this is the first thing that i don't like to see is there are washers under the clamp that means that it could have had the blue light of death at some point and there are times when the white light of death can be caused by a faulty apu so hopefully that's not the case because if it is this is all just a waste of time okay and immediately i can see that the hdmi ic chip has been replaced and i know that because first of all the shield is not there second of all there is some flux around the chip that i can see from when it was replaced now it's time to get the motherboard out and i can tell that it was me that did the work on this because as you can tell there is the perfect amount of thermal paste on the apu now let's start having a look at the hdmi port and all the circuits and components surrounding the hdmi port and the hdmi chip so the first thing i want to do is go through each one of these pins give it a little push and just see if it moves at all that would indicate that it's a bad solder joint but all these pins are soldered on completely fine so we know that it is not a problem with the hdmi port so next i'm going to check these diodes behind the port and see what those readings are so i have my meter in diode mode now i'm just going to put my leads on each of these diodes one way so we've got ol ol and 1.9 and oh well that's totally normal so a diode should have a reading one way and not the other that diode says 0.5 which is normal 0.5 which is normal 0.5 which is normal and 0.9 which is not normal that leads me to believe maybe a problem with the hdmi chip on the back side of the board so let's look at that next and here is the hdmi chip this chip has already been replaced so i'm just going to go through and check each leg make sure it's soldered on correctly if any of these pins are loose that means that it is not soldered on correctly and is likely our problem i know you probably can't see this quite as well as i'd like in the camera that's as far as i can zoom out with this microscope camera so and none of those legs moved at all it still could be a problem with the chip i'm going to check these filters right here and then if those are good i will replace this chip just because these chips are known to be faulty even some of them when you get them brand new they can be faulty so i'm going to replace this one with a known good chip that's a chip that i know for sure is good and that will rule out this chip before i replace the hdmi chip i do want to check all these filters these filters have a coil of wire between this pin and this pin so there should be continuity between here and here but there should not be continuity between here and here and there should also not be continuity between the filters themselves so going to resistance mode on my multimeter so the beep means that there's a connection between here and here and there is i'll leave my lead on this filter and jump over to this filter and there's no connection there but there is there no connection there but there is there and that is how it is supposed to be okay there's absolutely no problems on these filters now it's time to replace the hdmi chip so now i'm just going to come in with my hot air heat up the chip then i'll place the new chip and heat it up again to melt all the solder joints and connect all the legs see some of the joints are starting to get shiny there we go now i'm going to come in with the new chip i will put on some fresh flux then i'm going to tack down two of the legs and then i'll come back in with the hot air to finish the job so now i need to make sure everything is lined up and it is i can tack down a few more of the legs now i'm going to bring the hot air in push down just a little bit on the middle of the chip and that will enable all the legs we push down into the solder and then i'll remove the hot air and let it harden [Music] now i just need to come in with my pick and push on each leg gently but enough to make sure that it is soldered on all the way okay and they all look good now that this chip is soldered on correctly and we know it's a good chip let's get this motherboard back in and test the console and see if it'll show a display i have this ps4 together just enough to test it so now i'm going to plug it in and see if it'll work and here we go you think it's going to work let's find out so we have the white light again unfortunately it's still not working so now i gotta get it taken aback apart and see if i can figure out what's going on i'm still pretty worried about this apu i think that might be the problem the blue light of death but i still want to check out the rest of the hdmi system and just make sure there's nothing i've missed okay so i know it doesn't look like it but i've been testing and working on this thing for several hours now and unfortunately i just cannot figure out what the problem is usually a white light of death console i can fix pretty much every time i'd say i'm about 99.9 successful with white light of death consoles unfortunately this one i'm not i've replaced the hdmi ic chip two times i replace the hdmi port just to make sure i have a hdmi port tester that i used and that showed that it was good i checked all the filters all the capacitors all the diodes and there are absolutely no problems on any of the hdmi circuitry so unfortunately i think this one must be an issue of a blue light of death except for it still does show the white light this is the only ps4 out of the thousands that i've repaired that i've seen this specific issue with and unfortunately i just haven't figured out for sure what's wrong or how to fix it right now i'm chalking it up to probably the apu but unfortunately i just can't say for sure if you know of a repair person that has a youtube channel that wants a little bit of a challenge let me know down in the comment section and maybe i can send it to him now that i'm giving up on this ps4 it's time to look at the special edition xbox one s before i get started repairing this xbox one s i want to take a minute to talk about our sponsor for today's video jlcpcb jlcpcb is the best place to get your custom circuit boards printed as they offer a low price and very high quality you can get four layer pcbs for only two dollars and free smt assembly for four layer pcb orders but the offer ends on december 25. see all the details at the link in the description you can make your order for custom made pcbs right on their website at jlcpcb.com the website is easy to use your circuit boards will get printed fast and also shipped to you very quickly so if you need custom pcbs printed i recommend pcb and you can find a link to their website right in the description now let's see if i can get this xbox one s fixed so then what i have on this xbox one s says clicking hard drive and no display that is actually a fairly common problem with these i'm assuming there's something more wrong with it but the first thing i want to do is get it started up and just verify that those are the only problems then we'll get it taken apart all right now let's see what it does when i try and start it up i hope that's coming through on my microphone so this for sure has a hard drive issue so i have to replace that first and then after we get that replaced then we'll see if there's anything else wrong first things first we need to remove this bottom part of the case for that i'm going to use my freakishly long screwdriver some of you may remember that from other xbox videos so in here i'm just releasing these little tabs there's a tab there a tab there a tab there and a tab up here next i'll remove all the green t10 screws [Music] now with those removed we can remove this outer shell just by pulling here on each side and then pushing up now with that removed we can remove all the silver screws and then also this little board over here and this little board right here so this is the hard drive it is a one terabyte hard drive and i have another one terabyte hard drive that i've already installed the xbox software onto but my feeling is there's probably going to be something else wrong let's see what happens i'm just going to set the hard drive in here just like that then i'll plug the power button back in and then we can power it up just like this see if we get anything on the screen and will it show a display let's find out so we'll let it sit there for a while i even restarted it and there's still just nothing on the screen so i think it's time to dig into this a little bit more i need to remove all the components on top of the motherboard and take a close look at the hdmi system and see if we can figure out what's going on and now it's time to have a closer look at this entire hdmi system and see if we can figure out what might be going on all right so here we are under the microscope first thing i want to do is check each one of these pins on the hdmi port itself and they all look good so far if any of them move while i do this that means they need to be resoldered to the board those pins all look perfect so next thing is going to be to check these filters so i'm going to set my multimeter in ohms mode i'll put one probe here and one probe here and then one probe here and one probe here and so on across all of these and there should be a beep each time so just test the probes and they work fine it has some flux on it good okay so all of those are good now it's time to look over at this little silver ball grit array chip also known as bga these are fairly common faults on the xbox one x but not very common on the s so this is the ground side of the capacitor and this is not that's what it should do there should be no resistance to ground on one side and very high on the other side these are all normal so far okay now this usually these black ones are resistors i don't believe there should be continuity there so i think there might be possibly a short in this guy i'm going to get another board and see what the other board tests like and see if that's normal or not so here we go with a different motherboard once again i'm just testing to see if there should be zero continuity ground on these pins and it looks like there shouldn't be which is what i would expect okay so i think what i'm gonna need to do is put this chip onto the faulty motherboard then we'll see if that'll fix it [Music] [Music] so we've got that started on correctly if you noticed towards the end of that last clip it was kind of like floating around right just where it was that means that all the solder balls underneath were liquid and the hot air was just making it move around just a little bit solder has a good amount of surface tension so if you get everything lined up right it'll just stay just like it's supposed to and then once you remove the heat then it'll solidify and you've got good solder joints so now that this is replaced let's see if there are still shorts on these resistors no short no short no short okay that's what we need so i think at this point it's ready to test here we go okay and it looks like still no signal i know for sure we have one of the problems fixed two of the problems because we have the hard drive and that small bga but it looks like maybe there's more wrong so i gotta get it all taken back apart and look at the motherboard again we know this chip is good we know these are good we know this chip is good i've checked all the other little components around here there's no shorts to ground and no other obvious issues so unfortunately i just don't see anything that's obvious that's wrong with this motherboard i've checked absolutely everything on the hdmi circuit as well as replaced the hard drive because the old hard drive was clicking but unfortunately none of that fixed the issue on this xbox one s i really hate ending this video without being able to fix either of those consoles so i've got one more that's a special edition ps4 let me show you this is a special edition destiny ps4 and i'm gonna have this fixed by the end of this video one way or another so the only thing i know about this ps4 is it has the blue light of death so let's start it up and verify that then we'll figure out how we can fix it and it definitely does have the blue light of death the light is just flashing blue so now let's take it apart see what's going on and see how we can fix it i have not opened this up so this is fresh from gamestop these stickers have not been removed so whatever we find in here is basically straight from gamestop other than if it is dirty or something like that now you might be wondering how i'm going to fix the blue light of death since in other videos i have said that that is not something that i fix or not something that is very fixable and it is true that i don't generally fix blue light of death problems usually that means that the apu on the motherboard is faulty or the solder joints under the apu here we go with the warranty stickers you can see those are fresh and have never been removed before so in this case what i'm planning to do if there's nothing we can do with this console which i'm pretty sure there's not i'm actually going to replace the motherboard i've got several motherboards here that don't work so what i'll have to do is repair the motherboards that i have and then put the repaired motherboard into this ps4 also before we get too serious let's clean off this gunk that's on this top case now the motherboards that i have here i don't know for sure are fixable either so hopefully we find one at some point that we can fix because i really want to see this working again these are one of my favorite special editions of the 1215 model of ps4 and this is just isopropyl alcohol that i'm getting on this gunk that's on the case i might have to let it soak a little bit and then it'll just rub right off this works for almost anything and there we go that looks much better that's interesting we got a random thermal pad right there alrighty then we're missing one screw right here and we're missing one screw right here other than that it looks like everything's here now just have to remove all these little screws get this plate off then we can pull the motherboard out another random thermal pad over here so we have one two three four five six seven eight ram chips and one two three four five six thermal pads where they're supposed to be the other two were just in random places on this console now i'm gonna remove these screws then we'll take a look at the other side of the motherboard and here we go time to have a look at the other side of the board oh we got another random thermal pad so i see two different thermal pastes here we've got this white thermal paste and then underneath is the gray thermal paste from the factory so i'm trying to figure out it looks like there may not have even been enough thermal paste maybe there was it's really hard to tell but it looks like they definitely didn't clean it off very well overall though i don't think i see anything that would normally cause this ps4 to have the blue light of death so most likely there's just problems underneath this apu with faulty solder joints or the apu itself could be bad i actually don't notice any repairs that have been done on this so maybe they did something to the disk drive on this one but i don't see any other repairs that have been made so i'm actually going to clean this up put more thermal paste on and then i'm going to put it back together enough just to test it again the reason for that is with those random thermal pads it actually could cause a problem where the board doesn't sit down onto the heatsink how it should i don't think that's the issue but i'm gonna test it just to make sure you never know what might happen when you put in the perfect amount of thermal paste there we go so randomly my hand touched one of these ram chips that is super super hot this is the ram chip that is getting super hot you can actually see it's discolored it's brown on the top versus this one that's just the regular black if you've watched a lot of my videos then you'll know that the blue light of death can be caused by the ram chips it's just not quite as common as the apu or solder joints under the apu this is one that you just can't replace without reballing it so this motherboard for me is unfortunately unfixable let's move on and see if we can get a motherboard that will work for this console so here is the first motherboard that might work for this special edition ps4 it looks like at some point maybe it had some sort of liquid damage it also is bent a little bit as you can see we got a bend in the whole thing and then even more of a bend right here so i have no idea if this motherboard will work but the main problem that we have right now is that this power supply connector has been torn off of the motherboard so i'm going to fix that and then we'll put this thing in and see if this motherboard will start up and now with this soldered on nice and secure we can put this motherboard in the ps4 hook up the power supply and see if this one works maybe if i just put on the perfect amount of thermal paste then it'll work there we go here we go let's see if this motherboard works okay it's restarting that's normal yes so it is giving me this error that's because this hard drive is out of the old motherboard so i'll need to reformat that then i also need to test everything else like the disk drive and make sure the controllers connect just to make sure everything on the motherboard is working and everything's looking good so far this goes in nicely and there we go it is now playing the disc so luckily this one is actually fixed because the other two i couldn't fix unfortunately that's just how it goes sometimes without any schematics or any details on the motherboards there's only so far i can take it sometimes thank you to jlcpcb for sponsoring this video thank you for watching and i hope you have a good one

Channel: TronicsFix

Views: 453,003

Rating: 4.9103303 out of 5

Keywords: Tronicsfix, tronicsfix ps4, tronicsfix xbox one s, xbox one s, ps4, game console, electronics repair

Id: ewgoJ0avi6o

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020