Gregory's Serverthread in which I talk about why the "wrap your games console in a towel" or "reflow the bga" thing works to fix some consoles, and it's nothing to do with solder balls.
 14 comments
  @gsuberland AFAIK there was a materials problem with solder joint reliability that caused Red Ring of Death. Or, if it was a capacitor problem, the caps were on the BGA itself and not on the motherboard. This is based what people were oddly quiet about, and who was quiet. @trollball @gsuberland https://youtu.be/z2d6IMBS8oY?t=1148 @9names @gsuberland They skim over that it was a temp cycle failure between the die and the BGA substrate, on a FCBGA. Not between the BGA substrate and the PCB. The video makes it sound like temp cycling is an odd thing to cause failures. @gsuberland Which is not to say your bit about ceramic capacitors is incorrect. I am a chip guy not a ceramic person.  @gsuberland that's amazing, cheers. Believed to this day it was about solder. So were Microsoft penny pinching on the 360's design? I never did try the towel technique. My launch model died after 13 months, its replacement was DOA, and I sold my third one to move. My 4th (the redesigned jasper model) eventually died, but reapplying thermal paste and using a new X frame to hold the heatsink in place sorted it out. Although I only tried after buying a 360E. So have two! They both still work. @gsuberland this has got to be a fork of Hanlon’s razor. Maybe: Don’t attribute to the frustration of BGAs that which can be attributed to penny-pinching?    |
after that supreme nerdsnipage I am going to sleep