Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Brute force and electronics don't get along so well - episode 2

Another case for repair!


Somebody saw my original repair post for poor GPU and asked me if I could fix his motherboard.
Seems like owner has tried to install new CPU cooler and screwdriver pierced motherboard coating and one of the memory lines is cut. 

Here are the pictures that he shared with me

Things are a bit harder now because you see those are timing lines, which means instead of trusting chip to control when timing signals are released you trust good old physics. Electric flow speed is about 50-99% of speed of light depending on medium it is traveling. So with some length difference between lines you get wanted delay for signal to arrive at the destination (this design is utilized with some oscilloscopes to measure very high frequency signals (over 500MHz))

So for this repair I need to trace the line very carefully and use same width repair copper foil.

Below are pictures of the fix.



Now I just have to wait a bit until the board owner tests does the board work now.

Edit: Owner reported me that motherboard works perfectly. One less device for WEEE.

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