PS2 V7 Garbled Video Problem (Distorted Video on bootup)

[cheebster]

Hi. I had a perfectly working V7 PS2 4 hours ago. I'm posting here cause i'm out of ideas, and i would appreciate any input. I've tried to install a Duo2SE chip on it, and i got this screen i attached as a display. I then uninstalled the chip, to see i still have the same problem. :|

The console was perfectly working before the install. I'm also pretty confident on my soldering skills, they were all clean points as far as i could tell..

If anyone got a clue what is wrong, and any ways to fix that, thanks in advance !!!!

[kidman64]

overheating? that's just a blind shot, since i know that overheating can cause broken graphics on pc

[cheebster]

From a Cold boot, it does that.. so you mean a chip got damaged by overheating ? Um.. Possible. I tried to reflow most of the bga chips on the board but it didn't do much. Using an infrared rework station...

Thanks.

[l_oliveira]

You might have a solder splatter on the GIF bus. It's the connection from the Emotion Engine chip (EE) to the Graphics Synthesizer (GS) chip. There's a bunch of 42 ohm resistors there. Also one of the resistors might be broken.

Or it's also possible that you damaged one of the RDRAM (Rambus Ram memory) chips with static electricity.

I lost a japanese V5 once that way... Man it sucked ..


Edit: judging by the white bars on the scren I'd still give a through check on the GIF bus resistors as they might cause communication errors which can lead to such kind of graphical corruptions.
Ram failure can cause graphics corruption too but I don't remember seeing white strips on machines which had faulty ram...

Try to reach the memory card menu and see if it can load all the icons. Machines with faulty ram usually crash at that screen when a MC fill the screen with 3D icons...

[cheebster]

l_oliveira, hey there. What chip(s) is the Ram on those boards ? Sorry don't have much experience with PS2's (but i do have some with board-level repairs on other kind of systems). I did check all of the resistor networks between the EE and the GS chips, they were mostly 47 ohms (were those the ones you were refering to as 42 ohms ?) and they all seem pretty good. I got no clue what could have caused this (can a faulty chip do this ?!)

I've searched the board for splashes of solder, none so far, reflowed the whole board on the preheat station at 425 degrees, smashed it around when connected to see if there was any changes to the display (cold solder joints ?) and no luck on any of those.

Anyhow, if you have a minute to add me on msn, cheeb_w0n at hotmail.com, it would be nice to talk for a few. Thanks in advance, cheebster.