Lately I’ve been craving for some good, old console action, so I got me a few samples to work on.
Case 1: CECHL04 – PS3
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I refuse to buy “non-working” PS3s. Why? Delids.
I’ve bought so, SO many of those lately, that I refuse to buy another one. It’s not that these are unfixable, I mean you can swap the CPU, NOR flash and SYSCON, but let’s be honest, it’s not worth it.
But then I got this one: working, 65/65 RSX/CELL, dead BD drive, as a sweetener a bunch of original controllers, a fake one and a game. A pretty good find for the price I paid, if I do say so myself.
As You can see, all the case is good for is a throw into the garbage can.
For those unaware, this is a ribbon cable going to the BD drive. Not a good sign.
Case is cracked in multiple cases; one trickshot into the bin later I’ve got a replacement ready.
It came from a CECHK, but besides a different letter it’s same as the original one.
CECHK case also came with heatsinks that have denser fins, so I’m going to use those, as well as fresh thermopads.
As for the goodies, I was too excited there, so these are the only pictures I’ve got, but the motherboard got a cleaning, new battery, and a delid. Basically all the necessities for long lasting console.
At this point I think I should say something about the NEC/TOKINS, again. There are NOT a problem! Unless SYSCON senses problems with power I actively refuse to replace them. Their performance is way better than a ‘normal’ tantalum capacitor, so as long as they work, they are fine to stay.
Partially reassembled, just to test if delid was succesfull.
Yep, it works. I need the FSM mode in order to remarry the drive, so I installed CFW.
It doesn’t look like anything’s broken, but it still refuses to read games, even after remarrying the drive. Time for a replacement.
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Yeah, all my spare SATA drives have problems. Two have broken bits rattling inside them and one is labeled “laser”. Are You thinking what I’m thinking?
Time for a laser swap (obviously laser was taken from the dead mechanism drive).
It’s really easy to do that, just take both drives apart, pop the old assembly out, pop the new one it and that’s it! I had some minor problems with the laser carrier motor, but I just needed to manually push the assembly back and it’s working fine.
Top shell also was replaced. It need some gentle touches to buff out scratches, but overall it turned out “usable”. Now, let’s see the controllers.
#1 is fine besides the bottom cover, somebody stole the plastic bit between the L1/L2 and R1/R2.
Don’t worry, I’ve got a fix, just for You! These came from a spare parts only PSX controller.
Does it look perfect? ABSOLUTELY NO.
Does it work perfect? ABSOLUTELY YES.
The second one though… was a little bit tougher.
It was missing a rumble motor, had a dead right analog and a bad battery. I sacrificed the third controller to replace the motherboard and battery, I also glued back together the broken motor retention assembly and obviously cleaned the entire thing.
*insert image here*
I had to do something so quickly back then, that I forgot to take a picture, and now that I write this post I don’t have this controller at home to show You the end result.
Sorry.
Case 2: A very sad Xenon XBOX 360
Yes, this is all I’ve got. No case, no drive, not even the fan shroud. However…
… what I do have is a Y1 revised GPU. These are all 90nm GPUs, true to the era, but with a higher TG underfill, making them as reliable as newer models.
There seems to be quite a bit of stigma aroud these consoles, but not all are bad – we’ve got revised Y1, older Korean made Y1, which are also good, and the holy grail GPU – Elpis – 80/80nm Rhea-like with scrambled BGA pinout to fit the Xenon motherboard. I myself only use Elpis-fitted boards for JTAGabble CPU mods.
It cleaned nicely, however there is one caviat I did not see.
It’s not a big deal at all, it’s just more “unnecessary” work to be done.
A few minutes later the console is fitted with new SATA port.
I obviously couldn’t help myself and did an EXT_CLK mod on this console. My wiring isn’t the best, but I still always get into the dash on first or second glitch. For a Xenon this is really good.
I did have one problem though – after flashing the modded NAND I got RROD – 1033. After flashing the NAND again RROD went away and I could proceed with testing.
As You can see, for the testing purposes I fitted it with a DVD drive and played some good, old Halo 3.
Case 3: Jasper XBOX 360
This one is a bit of a fail, but not really at the same time.
This console at first didn’t power on – lights out, noone was home.
At the very least noone was here.
BUT THEN…
Out of the case the console fired up.
Weird. Does this mean that the case was preventing it from booting up?
I did the standard thing – clean, replace TIM and do the RGH.
However, as soon as I wrote the ECC the console started to shut down after a few seconds. No RROD, no unusal fan speed changes, no voltage fluctuations, it just refused to stay on.
Eventually I managed to get the CPU key, but after the NAND flash it doesn’t output anything on HDMI or component, neither will it stay on.
I reverted the NAND flash, as well removed the RGH wiring, but to no improvement.
Then I discovered something – pressing on the NAND chip makes the console not shut down. Still doesn’t output anything, but it’s still something.
There’s a bit of a catch though – pressing bends the entire motherboard, so guessing by the symptoms there are cold joints either under the GPU, SB or HANA.
Since there is most likely BGA rework needed, I think this board will be a perfect candidate for…
How do I say it without spoilers…
ekhm ekhm… future project.
Thanks for reading!