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[Repair Log] Naomi 2 won't boot

The chip delaminating from the board is unfortunate, but is all too common with Naomi 2 and Hikaru motherboards. Hopefully better, more affordable tools will come along so that we can more easily restore these boards into working order. Sorry buddy.
 
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10-15 years ago I used to have a Dell xps laptop with nvidia graphics that wouldn't boot due to bad soldering on the nvidia chip.

I did a nasty "bush fix" by putting a small weight on the heat sink and blast the heatsink with hot air for 1 min. At time I didn't even have a hotair station and used a hair drier :D

Surprisingly it worked for several months with daily use.

I heard of people doing similar "fixes" on red ring xboxes.

Possibly worth trying here if it's scrap?
 
MickyMac said:
10-15 years ago I used to have a Dell xps laptop with nvidia graphics that wouldn't boot due to bad soldering on the nvidia chip.

I did a nasty "bush fix" by putting a small weight on the heat sink and blast the heatsink with hot air for 1 min. At time I didn't even have a hotair station and used a hair drier :D

Surprisingly it worked for several months with daily use.

I heard of people doing similar "fixes" on red ring xboxes.

Possibly worth trying here if it's scrap?
Click to expand...

Well, I kept it working for another week or so, but the thing was definitely dying for good (I should have taken a picture -- the stack on the heatsink was higher than last time!). I did try reflowing it a few times just for kicks, but it wasn't very successful. The space around the chip is relatively crowded, and there are components on the underside as well so you can't really crank up the temperature. Plus the heatsink is permanently bonded to the chip, it sucks away almost all the heat instantly. Also, I found out that the chip is not an actual traditional chip package: it seems to be a weird mix between a flex PCB (think flat flex cable) with a BGA pattern on the underside. There could be other components bonded to it as well that certainly will fall/move with heat. Just handling it I noticed that what is supposed to be the die is just a blob glued to the flex, so it's pretty easy to rip it out if you're not careful. This thing was definitely made to fail, unfortunately...
 
doccaz said:
Now for the good news: I got it to boot, play the jingle, show the logo and enter the test menu:

:unsure:
Click to expand...
Sorry for bringing this back from the dead but what did you do at that time ?
You didn't mention what you did to successfully making it boot ? I believe this could help.
 
Rafo said:
Sorry for bringing this back from the dead but what did you do at that time ?
You didn't mention what you did to successfully making it boot ? I believe this could help.
Click to expand...

Well, after swapping the RAM chips, I got some life out of it after just pressing down on the main CPU heatsink. It turns out that some of the BGA balls were not touching the board anymore. So I placed increasingly larger heavy objects on top of it, and it got to boot and work for a few days. But after a while, this crushes the solder even more and it needed more and more weight to get good contact on all these balls. And as I noted, the Naomi doesn't use a chip with "normal" substrate, it's a weird mix of flex cable with BGA balls that's permanently bonded to the heatsink. It degrades itself with its own heat and is very hard to re-solder/reflow, basically.
 
Okay, thanks for sharing. Too bad it couldn't revive this board for long, though.
 
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