Ironically almost exactly 2 months after posting this thread:
"Who still has their original Xbox 360?"
http://www.ls1gto.com/forums/showthread.php?t=267757
I got the dreaded RROD. Now, what are the odds? Murphy's Law I suppose, but I think Microsoft secretly snuck into my house and replaced my board. They didn't want the "special" ones that were RROD proof leaked.
Anyway...here's my story as I told it to some buddy’s at work via email. I just had a discussion with them a little while ago about BGA's (ball grid array-its the package IC that the CPU/GPU is comprised of) and how one of my products at work has had some solder issues with it.
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Speaking of Xbox 360, I had some fun recently. Remember our BGA discussion a few weeks back? About "red rings of death"? Yeah….
So on Wednesday before Thanksgiving I was playing Midnight Club Los Angeles. I have a nice 69 camaro that I race around and noticed some lines on the screen in the middle. I figured it was my AV cable because I had unplugged it recently to test my buddy's 360. I wiggled it around but it didn't go away or change at all. So I went to bed around 3am like usual for a non-work night. Thursday was turkey day and when we got back from up north at 12am all I wanted to do was get some Call of Duty World at War multiplayer in before bed. Well I turned the Xbox on and it had the red rings of death!!! Actually it only had 1 red ring and an E74 message on the screen. After some research I found it was the GPU problem that everyone else has and one of the RROD causes. This is a poor soldering job on the BGA part. So there are a number of "internet fixes" out there. Most of which are retarded.
1) Wrap your Xbox in a towel so it overheats. This causes the part to get hot enough to re-solder itself. ---let me tell you how much of a fan I am NOT of this idea
2) X-clamp fix. There is an X-clamp that is on the bottom side of the board that holds the heatsink tight to the BGA parts. Namely the GPU and CPU, so there are 2 of them. Well the x-clamp fix basically uses washers on the x clamp side so that it pulls tighter onto the CPU or GPU. I guess this added pressure sometimes helps the connectivity of the BGA balls.
3) Heat gun. They say to heat the board with a heat gun around the parts and they re-solder.
Well…1 and 2 are out of the question. I don't like 1 and 2 sounds like a retarded band aid. So I did try 3 with a blow drier (no heat gun at home, my good one is at work) and I actually thought it worked at first even though I figured there was no way it could get hot enough to melt the solder. For about 10 minutes there were no lines on the screen, then they re-appeared like magic. I restarted and got the red ring again so I gave up.
The next day, Friday, I tried a modified version of 1. I didn't like it but I did it. I took the heat sink off and let the Xbox get up to temp until it overheated. I let it sit for 20min like that and then let it cool off. Again, it fixed it for like 10min until I restarted. Then I tried my final effort. I did a google search to see what temperature BGAs get soldered onto the board. This obviously wasn't anything "Xbox 360" related nor did I think anyone in that realm would have any idea. I did searching for SMT information to get a "real world" figure. I found that most lead free BGAs are soldered at 221C-228C for 60-90 seconds. This is 430F to 442F. So what did I do?? You guessed it.
I disassembled the 360 down to the bare board and put it in the oven. That's right….my oven. I put it in at room temp and baked it up to 375F for 20min. This was my pre-heat stage. There are several parts on my product that require pre-heating at the assembly plant so this made sense to me. I took the board out and stuck it in the microwave in an attempt to retain as much heat as possible---the microwave is a very small space---no I didn't turn it on
Then I raised the oven up to 450 and monitored it via the dial until the temp was around 425F; this only took a few minutes. I stuck the board back in and waited 3 minutes. I checked the temp of the oven and it had reached close to 450F by then. I thought to myself that by now (3minutes) the board had probably just gotten back up to 420 degrees or at least close since I had it cooling off in the microwave. I waited an additional 2 minutes near 450 degrees. My thought was that in those last 2 minutes the board temp may have gone from 420 to the magical 430-442 and hopefully causing a re-flow of the BGA solder balls.
I took the board out and let it cool off to room temp. MAN did it stink the kitchen.
Put it all back together and it works! It’s fixed! I baked my Xbox 360 in the oven like some cookies and fixed it
I played all weekend with no issues…and yesterday since I stayed home from work. Woo hoo!!!!!!!!
2005 GTO Owner
