Gave RAM upgrade a try

I came across the 16MB RAM chips that can be used to upgrade the original xbox' RAM from 64 to 128MB on aliexpress when looking for something unrelated, and at $1.70 a piece they seemed interesting enough to hit the 'add to cart' button.
Jump forward to some 2 months later and the chips actually arrived. I installed them and everything worked nicely first try. Not noticing much difference in SNES emulation but N64 definitely got a nice boost. Not that I ever use it, but still, it's a cool little upgrade. This stuff is quite addicting

 

edit: I'm a moron who can't read. Super clean work!

 

Yeah looks great! Nice work

 

So you had to replace 8 of those ram chips? And if even one pin didn't connect correctly it wouldn't have worked? Nicely done!

 

No replacing needed, there are 4 of these 16MB chips installed and there are pads for 4 more chips on non-populated spots. So it's just a matter of soldering those down.

You're probably right about the pins. Solder bridges most likely cause a FRAG which will be obvious, but ok-looking soldered pins that got cold joints might cause intermittent problems which will be significantly harder to debug! Luckily I haven't noticed anything of the sort so far.

Unless you have amazing near eyesight, inspection with at least 4x magnifiers, or better yet, a stereo microscope would be advised for this!

 

Can I ask out of curiousity what kind of equipement you use for such tasks?

 

For soldering the chips themselves all you need is some solder and a fine tip, that's bare minimums.
To obtain really nice results flux is very important, personally I like amtech flux. Never buy Chinese flux, you never know what you're buying.
Other than that I used isopropyl alcohol to clean the surface, tweezers to position the chips prior to soldering them down. I used magnifiers to ensure the connections are good and to verify that no bridges were made. And to save the best for last, I used a weller RT10 gullwing soldering tip. For drag soldering I think this tip is unmatched and Weller makes some incredible tools for electronics repair and rework.

 

removing the lead free solder off the pads may help too (some XBOX consoles I've seen have the pads tinned with quite a bit)

 

That's a personal choice I would say. When replacing chipd it's a no-brainer but if there's only minimal hasl finish I prefer not to bother with wick as to not stress the pads unnecessarily. Perhaps important to note that using wick during (fine pitch) smd rework should be usually avoided. Solder bridges are to be fixed with flux! Especially untrained hands should refrain from using wick, it's too common to apply a combination of too much force and too much heat for too long, so a great recipe for pulling pads!

 

Working on this xbox was kind of nice and I've rediscovered how much I liked the console, so I gave it some more love.
While I was uploading some games over FTP, the xbox froze after a few hours of being on. Naturally, I decided to investigate the temperatures and although mobo and CPU seemed to be doing alright around 50°C (low 120°'s in Fahrenheit ), I felt some arctic silver woulnd't hurt. Had some trouble removing the GPU heatsink until I decided I'd just power on the xbox for some 30 seconds as to warm it up, then it came off without a hitch.

Now I would post a picture of what was originally on there but it's better that gooey junk remains unseen, so just the clean stuff instead:

Temperatures are reduced by about ~8-10°C I'd estimate. Worth it.


I retired an older (2009) desktop which freed up a 2TB hard drive. Thought it'd make a nice addition to this xbox, except there's the whole IDE vs SATA incompatibility thing. User 'thepitt' over at xbmc4xbox documented some greatly helpful research regarding disk compatibility and IDE-to-SATA adapters. Turns out these little things are incredibly cheap, and my disk is very much compatible.
Naturally I replaced the standard 40-pin IDE wire for an 80-wire replacement. Go hard or go home, right.



Well, the research was accurate because in no-time I had gained 1TB of space on F and G partitions. Just took some fiddling with different xbpartitioner versions to get both drives formatted in 64k sectors.


Next thing will be adding a modchip instead of the current TSOP bios. I've purchased some chips from bad_ad84 but am contemplating getting the most potent XBlast one from bennydiamond instead.