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Chihiro Maintenance?

Mrhide

Mrhide

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1- One of the chihiro in my wangans decided to die: black screen, no sound, green led.
I had already changed the classic caps next to the CPU in this one and both fans are still working fine.
I tried to change other caps but no success so far. Should I even bother to do them all? Is there hope or should I just give up?

2- If this working one died with working fans. should I do preventive maintenance on the other ones?! like what? remove and apply thermal paste to both CPU and GPU? anything else?


Thanks :(
 
Would it be possible to convert a retail Xbox to a replacement Chihiro motherboard? Have you looked into that idea? 🤔
 
I would try with a new motherboard, be it chihiro converted or not. the best way to prevent these from dying is replacing the fan with a heat sink like the one some other chihiros have. It should close well when you close your chihiro.
 
check voltages, I've found that the chihiro is the most picky and power hungry hardware in my collection (even more picky than NAOMI). I thought I had a dead chihiro for ages and it turns out it just needed a the PSU cranked to max because it drew so much power it caused a voltage drop
 
twistedsymphony said:
I've found that the chihiro is the most picky and power hungry hardware in my collection (even more picky than NAOMI).
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Really? I know we all have different experiences due to various factors/wear and tear on our mother boards but this hasn't been my experience at all. When I swapped in a chihiro type 1 into a hotd2 cab I wasn't thinking and hooked up the cab's psu. It powers on and works fine. It won't power a Naomi with the same netdimm I put on the chihiro. 🤷‍♂️
 
different model PSUs have different results I've found that the early model NAOMI PSUs work great with Chihiro while the later models don't work as well and the Lindbergh PSUs REALLY hate the Chihiro.

it's picky in different ways too. NAOMI Net Dim is picky about 3.3V while Chihiro is picky about 5V
 
twistedsymphony said:
different model PSUs have different results I've found that the early model NAOMI PSUs work great with Chihiro while the later models don't work as well and the Lindbergh PSUs REALLY hate the Chihiro.

it's picky in different ways too. NAOMI Net Dim is picky about 3.3V while Chihiro is picky about 5V
Click to expand...
Funny enough, its running with a naomi psu. And it powers on another chihiro just fine but will try to cranck it a bit… can’t hurt at this point

Edit:
5.3 / 5.1 empty, under load
3.4 / 3.331

No change.
 
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So the gpu heatshrink is glued … which doesnt seem optimal.

How do we know if this is toast or not? I keep reading about resoldering when fans do die but never « seen it »?

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Mrhide said:
I keep reading about resoldering when fans do die but never « seen it »?
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"reballing" it requires specialized equipment and a mask for the specific ball-grid-array. you don't see it because there are only a handful of people with the equipment and skill to do this kind of work and most of them aren't wasting their time with old xbox mobos.

ken can do it but on Chihiro even he goes to mobo replacement over reballing because of the complexity involved, and he doesn't even do reballs anymore for Hikaru because of the challenges there.

I believe mitsu bought the equipment at one point but I don't know if he's learned to use it well enough to start doing repairs.

if you're interested in just seeing the process you can can find lots of videos on youtube.
 
Well i was hosting an arcade evening friday and of course, another chihiro decided to die… i quicklytried a few things and gave up for friday: i stuck ridge racer V in it.

Ridge racer freezing during the evening gave me a clue that something was wrong other then the chihiro.
Today i tried with another power supply , as mentionned by @twistedsymphony and yup, that one works just fine now.

I am now tempted to sell one of my three wangans, with the working timebomb wangan midnight 3 original pc! :(
 
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