One of the more eye opening things for me about watching RU-vid channels like yours is that repairs such as this are possible, I went through most of my geek life thinking PCB damage usually meant death for any component. If you watch Tony at Northwestrepair do this type of repair on modern GPUs it is crazy especially when theres 12+ layers involved.
yeah its insane. ChrisFix germany did this on Nvidia and other GPUs too but he dont offer the rapair any more, its just so complex.. and its only gonna get worse pcbs are gonna go to 14layers + eventually
All that board archaeology, then still bad IDE. Good it was just a bridged resistor pack. Thank goodness only 4 layer, very nice repair for very nice 440BX.
@@monad_tcp It is my understanding that full sized ATX motherboards usually have 4-6 layers still, actually. It gets way too expensive to get more layers on a board that big so they try very very hard to keep it at no more than 6. I do know that in some products they can use 12 or 14 layers, but I don't think any $100 motherboard has that.
@@monad_tcp Not really. A lot of value motherboards still use a 4 PCB layer construction. The higher end motherboards used 6-8 layer construction. This was the case when you compared a Gigabyte 'Durable' series to an 'Ultra Durable' series.
@@PatientXero607 Well - My Asrock X670E Steel Legend has 8 layers and is considered a medium series motherboard, but even the higher versions (Tachi) motherboards won't go above 8 layer, so I think you are spot on.
Holy crap! Even the "dangerzones" looked small, it was packed with traces. Very impressive repair. A very nice board indeed. Back in the days i had a Soyo S370 Board. But the lower right corner, around one hole for stand offs was damaged and a small piece fell off. After that the board was dead because some important traces must have been there.
I actually didn't know the grey was a bug! I always just assumed my crappy screen was being crappy as usual. Also, thanks to videos like this, I have now gotten into microsoldering, saved several badly damaged boards (torn off ic pins, lightning damage), and will start fixing my rtx4080 this weekend, after it randomly let the smoke out of a Vcore power stage last saturday. Let's hope the core survived the potential 12V spike.
Coincidentally several years back I broke the edge of a perf board when cutting it for some projects. I did the same fix with super glue, but used pcb saw dusts instead. When everything was fixed up, couldn't even visibly tell it was broken before.
LOL :) I was shouting at the video "Wrong trace!" and a few seconds later, it appeared on the screen :-D Anyway, congratulations for bringing another board back to life ;) I'm so happy to see this venerable old hardware restored, and actually I'm taking much inspiration from you in similar endeavours, though at a much smaller scale (so far) :)
Regarding your question at the end; I am partial to the TUV4X myself, supports the last word in P3 the Tualatin 1.4GHz part with the larger cache. As I am sure you know, these systems remained competitive well into the P4 era. Thank you for another very enjoyable repair!
You should use a thinner wire for those traces, it would be much easier to work with. Incredible repair anyway! You have improved a lot in your skills! 😊
As a viewer, the repair seems manageable until the second the GIGANTIC, ENORMOUS soldering iron tip comes into view and shows how freaking small these traces are. Well done!
in situations like this i always wonder how much do we actually know about what goes where and how much is a pure guessing game also before i knew wbout existence of uv solder masks i was using 2 part epoxy glue mixed with acetone to either build a mask layer or soaking in pieces of toilet paper as a replacement pcb substrate, i even glued circuit boards broken in half using this method, but only single and 2 layer ones
You've done a solid work on repairing this CUBX-E. This was a very well known motherboard and it represents its era nicely. I've fixed 2 of them in the past, one had a broken traces cause of the million back scratches, a second one had a dead SuperIO chip. Glad it came to the right hands. And it is highly pleasurable to see a work done right, your content is amazing. 😀
very nice repair and board. i still have my first PIII 500MHz Slot 1 CPU and the intel RC440BX ATX board, based on the 440BX with the Riva 128/128Z onboard GPU and the Creative SB 64V sound chip. very rudimentary BIOS but i like it so much. the weird thing is that with the battery in place, it doesn't start, with the battery off, it starts :)) so happy my mom didn't recycle or sold the PC, even the case i still have it
I like taking enamel wire from old inductors to repair traces. Some have very small wire. The best part is the the have an enamel coating so won't short out. All you need to do is burn off coating with iron until solder sticks. Find some small inductors and cut the bottom, you will have a whole spool of enamel wire.
I loved your repair technique, at first I thought you were going to put tape on the chipped part and fill it with something like uv resin or just uv mask for board repairs
Indeed. My favourite board at the time. It was in an overclocked and custom water-cooled rig. Memory is fading but I think it also had a thermo-electric Peltier device in there too. I can’t remember the cpu and it’s clock speed. I still have the board and plan to build system around it soon.
nice job on the repair. it was lucky it didnt mess up the other layers. ultraviolet activated epoxy is nice. i wonder if mixing fiberglass dust with super glue would give it more strength than the baking soda.
The 440BX is an absolutely _classic_ chipset, so much so that it's still regularly the target used for emulated platforms in virtual machines, owing to its broad compatibility.
I had the P2B-F as my main box, then traded up to a fully populated CUSL2 Dlx. I later inherited a P3B F1 which I still have. All of them were excellent performers. Though that P3B is an absolute rocket.
Awesome video as always! Might I suggest "Engineer PTN-01 Titanium Tweezers" for your replacement tweezers? They are made from titanium so solder doesn't stick to them and they are super fine and very strong. They are also made in Japan. I love them. As for your baking soda and superglue patch, that works just fine. but you can also use some epoxy resin for that task as well.
Socket 370 was such an incredible overclocking platform. I used to have a Celeron 667Mhz, easily running at 1050Mhz. Unfortunately I got rid of that system, because I am sure it was capable of doing even more on a better motherboard.
I once had (in 1998) an OCed Celeron 533 OC'ed and stable at 850Mhz. Celerons of the S370 era were OC mad houses. shame to see CPUs of today's generation either locked or they can only OC around 150mhz higher than their OTB specs. without mad cooling requirements like LN2.
I suggest doing some testing with superglue acelerator in spray. It hardenes instantly the superglue, but keeping it transparent. Is amazing, as the result is still rock hard, but it looks very tidy, as the hardened part is indistinguisible from the wet superglue. No idea how it performs with stressed parts. This is not necessarily a replacement but could be a great card to have in the toolbox. Just a gente breeze of spray (leaving some mist around the part) does the trick. Another one for superglue I recently found was using cotton instead of baking soda. I use makeup cleaning pads, as you can cut thin squares pretty flat and easy to work with. For example gluing a side you can bent them to create supports, etc. It is also not a replacement but an extra option. Cigarrete filters seem to also do the same, but I haven´t tested. Anyway, as always, an absolute joy to wach, and that music of Povedeniya is just magical. Thanks!
very nice board and very nice repair. i still have my p3b-f with a socket 370 adapter and a p3 933mhz paired with a geforce 256. it's an absolute beast.
I do not know if it is better or not, but back in early 2000s i used an Asus TUSL2-C Mainboard with i815ep chipset. I really want to know how it compares with other ones.
Awesome work, perfect video. And some words about Tualatins btw... My practice and my own work with such processors says some chipsets for Pentium III seem not working at its full speed, and usually that are non-Intel chipsets. I have a good case of installing Celeron Tualatin via Slocket instead of Pentium II slot 1 here in MOW, after ROM.by bios update, and it became to work like a jet fighter. The same time I have an opposite example (Asus TUSL2C) with Pentium III 133 Tualatin - slow and poor. Perhaps this is a BIOS version issue...
its brother was the Asus CUSL2 with the 815EP chipset, I had the black perl Edition it was rare and its very rare now so if you see them grab them restore, i went for these boards as i was sad when all the PIII back then including many of the PII had integrated Audio now while some not bad i always had creative labs card of some sort. I really loved these boards. now days its copy and past and they hide somethings as well.
Suggestion for you for PCB damage mending, use acrylic epoxy resin in combination with colored dye for a good looking Mend. Also they do make trace kits for trace repair and would look very well done in the end.
If you have a well ventilated area to work in and an appropriate vapour mask, using fiberglass resin to replace missing areas of a PCB is the most permanent where bare traces are concerned. The alkaline nature of baking soda will eventually damage the metal.
The baking soda trick is nice, but if you ever need to redo the joints the kraze glue is literal poison. I know that because I work fixing phones, and I've had phones that the owner tried to "Jerry rig" with that stuff. I recomend use some UV Mask instead for a more "Pro" result. Great video nevertheless.
If I ever need brain surgery, I would like you to do it. Please also check datalines, I think something is wired incorrectly at the factory :) Anyway, very nice work! I often wondered if populating the empty capacitor spots on a mainbord makes any difference when pushing the board to the limit. Does it help in minimizing ripple / maximizing stability in any other way? Do you no longer need a stable power supply when populated? Perhaps interesting stuff for a follow up video.
For that generation, I bought a PIII 700e SLACR stepping. They'd all hit 933mhz. Huge performance boost and one of the legendary OC'ing chips of history. I also ran a BX board, I think it was a SOYO however? Not sure about that stepping. I just remember it sounding like a slacker...heh
Currently testing a pii-350, 440bx now. I’ll soon post my tests on Vogons, but using FASTVID some PCI & AGP cards show remarkable improvements, and others none. YMMV 😎
The white silkscreen seems to be there for protection. When you install a card, the bracket tang can cause some damage, and a layer of paint doubles the scratch resistance. I can see why they haven't felt the need to do this across the bottom of the board, since the very edge of the board is clear of traces, but why not near the AGP slot? I think they forgot.
Yea, TUSL2 is also a great board, but supports only 512MB RAM and it has no ISA slots. The RAM is not a real issue and 512MB would be more than sufficient for Windows 98, but missing ISA slot in a retro machine is a bummer.
I've had this board and unfortunately for me it was awful. It was very unstable, every single slot on the board was loosing contact upon swapping components... In my opinion TUSL2-C is way better, but no ISA slot tho. Anyway, great video! It's very impressive that you've been able to resurrect it :)
A bit of two-part epoxy would be a much stronger brace for that sort of thing, imho. (Plus, if you really wanted to, you could mix in some green nail polish with it)
I have a couple CUSL2-Cs and TUSL2-Cs. I also have an TR-DLS dual Tualatin server board. Such sweet stuff. Too bad ASUS let itself become a corporate money grubber.
off the top of my head I can't think of any S370 440BX boards that were better than Asus' CUBX boards. maybe close competitors were other BX chipset boards but the Asus CUBX was by far the best Gaming MB of the era.
Fantastic video as always. Love the new music as well! 2 question: What guage wire did you use for the trace repair, and what soldering iron do you regularly use? Sorry if these questions have been answered elsewhere. I would love to know though. Also is the angled tip preference or does it just do this type of repair better? Thanks a lot.
Thanks. The wire is AWG30 and the angled tip is thinner on the very end, that's why I sometimes use it. It needs some practice though to use a thin tip, because it's hard to get the heat to the right spot. Wider tips have better heat distribution, but also are a bit more clunky.
If I where build pc based on this board, I'd use: This Asus 440bx board Coppermine 850-1000mhz 256mb ram 4x64 Sb live! Or aureal vortex 2 + awe64 gold for dos Geforce 2 gts 32/64 With such setup you can play 1990-2003 games
i am runing my 1,4G Tualatin on MSI 815EPT PRO V5 had some issues with artifacts in games but problem solved bad cap near agp slot replaced so happy now🥰
Hi! New video is very pleasing, as always )) I own Asus CUBX-E once, its really great MB. But If saying about something even cooler in this generation, what about ASUS CUV4X family? ))) Once I own ASUS CUV4X-D... With 5*scsi drives in bucket mounted to 5" bay of hightower instead of 3 5" devices - oh, that is unforgettable sounded PC! And 2*P3-1000 - its... twice more that one ))) On Aida64 tests it beat P4-2800 and was on the same level as dual core Pentium D 2800 and minor Core2Duos (1.6 or 1.8 GHz something like that).
Just a small question regarding the baking soda + superglue - isn't baking soda going to be corrosive to the surrounding areas long term? Or does reaction with superglue create a completely inert non-reactive compound?
the mighty BX, but the via apollo (pro) chipset is very nice too! I have an Abit VA6 (sister of bh6) and my beloved Asus P2B-B (baby- AT!), both run anything from 233 to 1400 MHz. And both can underclock the P2 233 for the 486 feeling 😂
Amazing job, as always! Do I see this right?: it was mainly luck that the middle layers in the damaged area didn't have actual wires running through, because you would never have found the right source and destination? Or was it safe to assume that there are no wires there on the edges of the board?
Yeah, that was luck, however the inner layers mostly carry voltage and ground planes, so the chances are good that no smaller traces are damaged. Of course it's a question of the area of the damage and the size.
That's cool, easy repairs like this must make working on old boards like this very rewarding. I'm just never sure if the cyanoacrylate + natron mix might have any long term effect on the metal or pcb material. Hard to find detailed information on that.
late model bx chipset boards always command a premium these days. My bx board of choice is asus p2b, but a newer revision with updated voltage regulator so it supports coppermine voltages.
I wouldn't be so sure about using baking soda here. It is a base. Weak one but still a base. It might corrode things, given enough time. Some epoxy would be ideal here. Couple of layers of UV cured soldermask would be ok too.
