Chosen Solution
I watched your tutorial “Yellow Light of Death Repair” to fix my console but was confused about re-soldering it. I was expecting to see how to re-solder the chips but all I saw was using a heat gun. In my own experience I have never know a heat gun to be able to melt solder. So what is the point of making it hot? Its not actually heating the solder to the melting point is it? Thanks, Joe
The heat gun iFixit sells will definitely melt solder, plastic, light your wooden work bench on fire, burn the crap out you and light your cigarettes and cigars, It has two heat setting and is a great buy: Heat Gun
zep101, this is a twofold question. First let me try to answer the “heatgun” issue. For that I would like to direct your attention to the “semi scientific” experiment right here. Yes, it does melt solder. 2nd part of your question is the why you are using the heatgun. It is a bit more intricate to explain. The key to this is the design of the GPU which is a flip chip design. The proper definition of that can be found at Wikipedia “is a method for interconnecting semiconductor devices, such as IC chips and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), to external circuitry with solder bumps that have been deposited onto the chip pads.” So what happens is that the chip heats up (due to poor design of the ventilation and heatsinks of the console. Does not matter if it is a PS3, a XBox or some of the Mac laptop’s) and the bumps that connect the chip to the substrate lose contact and your chip (in this case GPU) fails. The heating of the chip for the reflow actually reshapes (most of the time) the bumps to the point of making contact again. That is the reason why some of the reflows just do not work. The connection between the IC and the substrate has absolutely failed. Not the most scientific explanation but I hope it makes sense to you.
