Raidernick

I've not discovered any incompatibility with just having 128mb installed and not patching any games, it just won't affect them at all if they aren't patched. It will greatly help the dashboard load times though, especiallyif you have a lot of games.

That's actually a ceramic capacitor and it looks like it exploded.

Yeah at least that one trace is bad. There are test pads from the beginning of the trace to the end of the trace that you can test on to see if there is continuity through the whole thing. As for the clock cap area, you DEFINITELY need to clean than before doing anything else, and make sure you get under the caps around where it was as they all definitely have corrosion under them.

Kind of hard to see but on the image of the bottom of the board on the bottom right where the black square is, under that, there are several traces that run along the edge of the board. Near the bottom of the black square where those traces make a zig-zag they look corroded, but it's hard to tell with the bad image and flux everywhere. If those traces are bad the xbox will appear completely dead and the power button won't do anything.

That would be a great idea if you want to destroy the console. The heatsink and die have to be specifically designed to use liquid metal. You might be able to use a clear coat of paint or nailpolish or uv mask or something over the entire interposer of the cpu and then install some kind of sponge around it like on the ps5. That wouldn't solve the problem of the heatsinks being aluminum, which will absorb the liquid metal over time(actually corroding them), drying the area out and basically causing it to act like it has no paste/liquid metal on it. It will also cause the die to oxidize on top which prevents the liquid metal from even adhering to the surface, it will actually travel away from the die and surround the outside of it rather than sitting on top. Finally, you have the issue of the gpu, it's not even metal but plastic. Liquid metal does not work on plastic. This is all besides the point that the xbox doesn't even get hot, the liquid metal even if it worked wouldn't make any meaningful difference to temperatures. Stick with paste.

I downloaded the artwork installer on 8 consoles and updated xbmc4gamers as well as the urldownloader on 2 more only 2 days ago. Are you guys sure the links are down for everyone?

They are "rare" in the fact that they were produced less than the other models, but none of the 360 drives as a whole are really "rare" so they are easy to find. Actually, as this point finding samsung drives might be harder as they were only used in launch models and other early consoles and most of those have broken and been thrown out by now.

Actually the 360 launched with the Samsung drives in them and the hitachi drives are actually the rarest 360 dvd drive as well.

I've only ever come across one ever in over 100 xbox's and it was in a 1.6b.

The 1.6 clock caps still go bad, they just have to be replaced unlike earlier revisions where you can leave them off.

Caps don't always bulge, they leak underneath which you can't see. Bare minimum you should replace the cpu caps and clock cap.

Cerbios, Startech adapter and Samsung DVD drives have a fundamental incompatibility if used with hard drives larger than 750gb. This is a 1.6 and almost definitely has a samsung dvd drive in it unless you are super lucky to have a hitachi. I have a thread here explaining this issue and how to fix it. The cerbios discord and xbox-scene helped me fix it. You need to use a specific version of the china green adapters and modify it with a resistor. So please check what dvd drive you have before buying a startech adapter. If you decide to not use the dvd drive at all the incompatibility won't matter.

If the board is extremely corroded I use a hot air rework station to remove them(this can be dangerous as they can explode). If there is little or no corrosion I will just twist them off with a pair of pliers, then desolder the legs left on the pads. A resistor array is basically several resistors combined side by side into one smd component. It looks like this: The resistors in these arrays will go out of spec on the board. This will make it stop working, these are very difficult to replace if you are new to soldering.

I replaced the caps because I thought they were bad, they were not. Unless your drive doesn't work in the stock system you don't need to replace the caps, or the resistor packs(which is what actually usually goes bad on these). I got the adapters from various sellers on ebay not amazon. I posted a picture of the exact one you need to get, they make 4-5 different but extremely similar ones and only that one will work.

It is still an issue. The drive won't work on first boot of the console with the startech and samsung. You'll need to reboot it until it starts working unless you use the green china adapter.