The BGA problem is not limited to laptops!
Most of you here know of the BGA solder balls issues plaguing laptops and netbooks, and to a lesser extent, desktop motherboards and GPUs as well.
However, i doubt any one of you had any idea you could find the same problem in a phone. Neither did i until today. A friend of mine brought this HTC Desire in. Random reboots were plaguing it, especially when doing intensive tasks such as playing games or browsing the web. As soon as the device would heat up, it would reboot, sometimes multiple times in a row. The reboots would not cease until it was left to cool down. Obviously, the issue only appeared now in the summer. If you use it in a room with aircon it's fine.
He bought it used so no warranty, and he's been quoted $117 for a replacement mainboard at the official HTC service center. Even on ebay, a mainboard is close to $100 when you factor in postage as well. He paid $200 for the phone about half an year ago, so spending $100+ on a new board wasn't an option.
A little browsing around revealed this is a common issue, and as far as the reports and forum posts i found say, 4000+ people have had their motherboards replaced. Some worked fine after repair, some failed again after another couple months. A quote from a related topic reads like this:
Among all those, there was ONE guy that said he took the mainboard out, removed a shield revealing the CPU, and used a heat gun to reflow it, and that fixed the phone. Here. Well, it was worth a try.
1st time around, around 1 minute at 375C, keeping the nozzle at least 1cm away from the chip. That's my usual routine for laptops. It rebooted again after ~15min of Angry Birds. So i hit it again.
2nd time, i kept the hot air on the CPU for around 3 minutes. This time, i played so much Angry Birds on it that i got bored. Seriously, i played more than an hour with no more reboots. Fixed.
The board was very interesting in that i had to rely only on my nose when doing the reflow, as NO visible flux vapor came out while i was heating it. None at all. Seriously, it looks like they've used solder with no flux!
Also, i found it puzzling that altho the shield (which is a fairly large piece of aluminum compared to the CPU) is touching the CPU, they did NOT apply any thermal paste between the CPU and shield. I mean, you have this here surface you can use to dissipate heat better, and you don't use it??? I put in thermal paste before i closed it up. Heck, it's possible that the supposed "new revision" boards have thermal paste or a thermal pad as the only change... I'm disappointed.
Now to see if it'll make it thru the summer. Or maybe my friend will sell it to someone else.
However, i doubt any one of you had any idea you could find the same problem in a phone. Neither did i until today. A friend of mine brought this HTC Desire in. Random reboots were plaguing it, especially when doing intensive tasks such as playing games or browsing the web. As soon as the device would heat up, it would reboot, sometimes multiple times in a row. The reboots would not cease until it was left to cool down. Obviously, the issue only appeared now in the summer. If you use it in a room with aircon it's fine.
He bought it used so no warranty, and he's been quoted $117 for a replacement mainboard at the official HTC service center. Even on ebay, a mainboard is close to $100 when you factor in postage as well. He paid $200 for the phone about half an year ago, so spending $100+ on a new board wasn't an option.
A little browsing around revealed this is a common issue, and as far as the reports and forum posts i found say, 4000+ people have had their motherboards replaced. Some worked fine after repair, some failed again after another couple months. A quote from a related topic reads like this:
As I mentioned before in another post on some other forum. The chance of getting a perfect HTC phone after repairs is like 35%. The chances of getting a phone with the same problem is also about 35% and the chances of getting a phone with the same problem and extra problems is the rest.
Among all those, there was ONE guy that said he took the mainboard out, removed a shield revealing the CPU, and used a heat gun to reflow it, and that fixed the phone. Here. Well, it was worth a try.
1st time around, around 1 minute at 375C, keeping the nozzle at least 1cm away from the chip. That's my usual routine for laptops. It rebooted again after ~15min of Angry Birds. So i hit it again.
2nd time, i kept the hot air on the CPU for around 3 minutes. This time, i played so much Angry Birds on it that i got bored. Seriously, i played more than an hour with no more reboots. Fixed.
The board was very interesting in that i had to rely only on my nose when doing the reflow, as NO visible flux vapor came out while i was heating it. None at all. Seriously, it looks like they've used solder with no flux!
Also, i found it puzzling that altho the shield (which is a fairly large piece of aluminum compared to the CPU) is touching the CPU, they did NOT apply any thermal paste between the CPU and shield. I mean, you have this here surface you can use to dissipate heat better, and you don't use it??? I put in thermal paste before i closed it up. Heck, it's possible that the supposed "new revision" boards have thermal paste or a thermal pad as the only change... I'm disappointed.
Now to see if it'll make it thru the summer. Or maybe my friend will sell it to someone else.
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