lazzeri Posted June 13, 2020 Share Posted June 13, 2020 The console is in great cosmetic shape. I’ve opened it and the board is in pristine condition - no stuffed capacitors, no leakages, no obvious solder failures. But all I get when power it up is garbage. The pattern is variable. Reset makes no difference. Plugging a cart won’t change a thing. I’ve tried to keep it on for a few minutes to charge capacitors. No changes. Touching the chips don’t show one of them hotter than the others. Any ideas of what it might be? Simple stuff like capacitors or voltage regulators? Or most probably a bad chip? Suggestions are welcome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+KylJoy Posted June 13, 2020 Share Posted June 13, 2020 99% sure it is one or more RAM chips. You can desolder the RAM, install sockets for them, buy new RAM and install it. Once your new RAM gets the system going you can test the old RAM by powering down the system and re-inserting an original RAM chip in lieu of one of the new ones to figure out if it is good or not. Rinse and repeat for all 4 to find the bad one(s). Someone would do it for you for a fee (like me), but you might be able to buy another unit for what that would cost for parts and labor. If you do it yourself, be careful desoldering on the old motherboard. Those are a bit fragile and you need to know what you are doing and have the right tools. But you can do it! Also, you can sell it to me. I could use a spare. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+stupus Posted June 13, 2020 Share Posted June 13, 2020 Yep, garbled video is most always bad video ram. This seems to be a big problem with these. It can be 1 pixel off to a complete garbled mess. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lazzeri Posted June 13, 2020 Author Share Posted June 13, 2020 Thank you guys! @KylJoy I’d love to but since I’m ouside USA shipping in and out might be prohibitive. ? I’ll check it anyway. Are those memory chips easy to find? Or are they somewhat uncommon? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+KylJoy Posted June 16, 2020 Share Posted June 16, 2020 If I remember correctly the RAM was not too hard to find. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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