The viability of repairing this rev 1.0 board

This board was one of a lot of three (actually #2 of 3, but I don't think that really matters). It did not boot for what soon became fairly obvious reasons.
Here I present a brief essay of what is wrong with this board and assess its fix-ability. Some decent pics and some commentary. I'll address actually fixing it later in another thread.



So here we go again. I have purchased a board as is (actually a lot of three) and am assessing it's viability here. All in all it's pretty bad but far from the worst boards I've seen :-)
Kernel 3944, That alone almost makes this board worth salvaging. You can run darn near anything on a box this old. Combine that with the ability to partition the FLASH ROM into 4 256K banks and we have a real winner as far as being worthy of repair.
The first thing that popped out at me was the amount of damage and missing components to the area between (roughly) the MCPx and the LPC port. All highlighted in yellow. All of the pads look good for the passive components. I'm a little worried about the pads for the 6 pin component (a transistor by the part number, Q7E1) . A little closer inspection should yield serviceable, if not ideal, pads for a replacement component. So all in all we are missing three resistors and one transistor. . . I'll update the values once I remove and measure them from a parts board.
The next missing component is C5D1. This capacitor provides bulk capacitance (and thus noise immunity in a way) to the DDR memory. Without this component in place I would expect erratic behavior from the box (depending on whether this chip was low or high memory some games and the dashboard may be fine). Replacement with a like value is ideal though a "close enough" approach would likely work as it is not part of a timing circuit.
The underside of the board does not look like anyone ever touched it for an alt D0 mod, so the rest of the circuit should be OK as well. A quick look at the top D0 was fine as well, so it would look like whatever happened to the components at the MCPx were the demise of the board.
In a nutshell, then:
  • There are several components near the MCPx that are missing and will need to be replaced.
  • There is a bypass cap missing near the ram, though this looks to be mechanical damage and as such should be quite repairable, as the pads look fine.
  • The top and alt D0's look fine and would tend to indicate that the box was not solder modded and was either modded using a solderless chip or a softmod. In any case D0 looks fine and the FLASH ROM looks to not have had write enabled.
  • The board should be quite fixable.

-nB