3mm destruction
22 Feb 2005Yesterday morning on the way to school I happened across a motherboard complete with processor in a computer case dumped on the side of the road, which I then proceeded to pick up (soggy dust and all — it’d been raining torrentially the night before), place in my bag, and lug around until I got home 10 or so hours later.
After I’d attacked it at school with tissues for a while, it was finally dry and (relatively) dusted, so I shoved it back in the bag and took it out when I got home, where it sat untouched until this afternoon, when I looked at it again. On second inspection, I found far more dust residue than I’d thought, so I proceeded to take the AGP slot clip off (that’s the black thing around the brown thing perpendicular to the three black strips close to the middle of the board) in order to clean gunk from between it and the green caps (the green circular things next to the black thing around the… you get the idea). Bad idea.
The clip has a fastener at the end nearest the rear of the motherboard (the side with the purple/pink thing next to the two silver things, or the bottom of the picture above), which slides up and out, so detaching that end was fine. It seems, in hindsight, that after that was undone the clip was to be removed by simply pulling upwards, not by sliding out backwards. Because I slid it out backwards next, and that was a disaster.
You can see in the image above that C399 is present and accounted for, but C400 shows two solder terminals and a whole heap of not-much else. It’s not perfect focus, but that’s one of the first times I’ve seriously used the macro feature on my digital camera, so I reckon it was decent! That shot from a distance of about 0.03m, by the way (You can click on the image above for a higher resolution version of it). Basically, as the clip moved backwards, it forced past the capacitor, detaching it from the motherboard (I figured the stress I felt was just plastic-on-plastic as I tried to remove the clip…), and then flying across the floor. Keep in mind this isn’t exactly the biggest component ever:
Yeah. I crawled around for a while after that.
I’m kind of hoping that it’s just a capacitor for the AGP port, because I can live without that being there, but I’d rather not plug in the motherboard and power up to find out it’s something else… so as soon as I can hunt down an iron which will do SMD soldering adequately (taking into account my pretty average motor skills with such things), I’ll try and bung that one back onto the board and use it all happily again. Alternatively, if anyone feels like volunteering their SMD soldering skills, you’re more than welcome to do it for me!