The great motherboard repair project (well maybe) Warning probably not 56k friendly

[alsenior]

The great motherboard repair project
(well maybe)

Ok so here is the skinny, I have one Abit ic7-max3 that got struck by a lightening
surge and the connector got cooked real good; and another ic7 that is just plain dead.
Now if I combine the two I should have a working board.

So I decided that I should remove the good power connector from the dead board and
combine it with the good board with a bad connector. Here is how I got on.

Firstly this is good board with the bad connector. As you can see the ATX connector is
completely crispyfied and is no good (fyi the surge hit the 3.3v rail hence the damage is
all at one end)



And here is the dead board. And it is just dead so off with it’s connector.



Here it is after 10 minutes with the hacksaw (damn PCB is hard to cut through)



so I tried another approach with an oversized pair of nips.
And here is the liberated connector still attached the small but of PCB



And so it is onto soldering 20 connections to the motherboard ( I was using a large soldering iron
and my wrist got tired real quick.

Here it is half way through or as I call it break time (plus the solder fumes were going to my head)

And here is the first half of the whole job finished. Not an easy task I’ll tell you now



Part 2 coming next week some time.

Also this gave me an idea of what I want for Christmas (a smaller soldering iron)

[ABIT Sean]

Wise choice to repair, those boards are getting hard to get now. But Ive never seen one of our boards being repaired like that.

[alsenior]

i was trying to unsolder the plug originally but the solder was just too hard to remove. if this work's it's going to be used as a file server. if it works that is. but yeah they are hard to find and if you do find one on ebay some command as much as £100