Crystal green x3 with face plate broken 😭

[hastings298]

Hi all

I was playing Black earlier (great game) and left it for a while, came back and it was frozen. Not too surprised. So a couple of restarts later and it's just getting worse. To the point where I can only get into XBMC for a minute or two, but can't launch a game without it freezing.

At this point I can still hold the white button and get into the X3 boot menu.

The power supply looks in a bad way, and I have an identical model lying around, so I swap it out and - no dice, pretty much the same thing as before.

Try changing the hard drive: Acts up a lot, get one or two boots out of it before i'm back to square one again.

Notice I can still boot into that blue screen where you can flash stuff, I figured maybe my BIOS had gone bad with all the freezes and restarts. Drop a new bios into a folder named C:/BIOS. Load back into the blue screen and manage to start flashing, gets about 3/4s of the way through and it just freezes again.

At this point it's completely fucked, just fragging, occasionally it gets to the "X" BIOS screen.

Absolutely heartbroken at this, it belonged to a friend of a friend who died in 2005 in a motorcycle accident.

If anyone has any idea what could be up with it i'm all open to ideas or paying for repairs (UK) if someone really knows what they're doing.

I really don't get it, I pretty much ruled out the HDD, i don't THINK it's the PSU since i replaced it and same again. Just don't know what's up with it. Won't boot into a Hexen 2019 disc I made either.

Please help!!!!

[SS_Dave]

It sounds like the caps near the heat sink and the power connector have failed,

Post a pick of the whole board.

 

Cheers

SS Dave

Soft modding is like masturbating, It gets the job done but it's nothing like the real thing.

[hastings298]

1 hour ago, SS_Dave said:

It sounds like the caps near the heat sink and the power connector have failed,

Post a pick of the whole board.

 

Cheers

SS Dave

Soft modding is like masturbating, It gets the job done but it's nothing like the real thing.

Hi Dave. Thanks so much for responding. I know those fail frequently, and agree it DOES sound like that with the symptoms (more and more freezes until its unusable, I mistook it for a PSU issue as it kind of sounds similar i.e the PSU sagging and not getting the parts the voltages needed) but I don't see any physical damage to the caps.

Pic attached, happy to take more pics.

Edit just turned the board over and saw this...

[hastings298]

One more overview of the rear

[SS_Dave]

It look like it has been wet or had something spilt on it.

The yellow squares look like rust and the black circles look like some sort of corrosionasion from liquid 

 

The black circle looks bad and also from possible liquid.

I looks like the caps have been replaced at some stage and possibly that's when the board was not cleaned or one of the caps is leaking bad.

I would try cleaning with Isopropyl alcohol and replace the 3 caps next to the heat sink.

If the HDD is unlocked you can swap a working board with the modchip from this board to the Halo case and it will work once you reflash the BIOS using the built in recovery OS on the X3 chip. If the hard drive is locked you will need the HDD key from the eeprom on the old board.

 

Cheers

SS Dave

Soft modding is like masturbating, It gets the job done but it's nothing like the real thing.

 

 

[hastings298]

I can confirm the HDD is/was unlocked, it's a 2tb drive I installed last year, I've moved it into another xbox for the time being. I have a spare unlocked IDE drive I could use with this.

I'm not very good with soldering, I'm not really sure how I would go about swapping the current damaged board the modchip is attached to? 

[hastings298]

UPDATE:

It's back from the dead and playing Destroy All Humans 2.

I got isopropyl alcohol and scrubbed down the reverse of the motherboard, taking particular care to scrub the areas that had some kind of green and brown corrosion, e.g. where you pointed out the legs of some chips. It was pretty much coming off in chunks.

No idea how long it'll keep working, the connections on the back aren't in great condition, but I noticed a nasty, persistent white residue that appeared after I let the isopropyl alcohol dry a few times. I got a toothbrush and kitchen paper and got all of it off. Let it dry for a while.

After that, I managed to get the X3 to boot into Live and loaded the X3 3294 BIOS and reflashed it successfully for good measure (banks 1+2+3+4 1MB). Now it's booting into the original dashboard for some reason, even though I know the X3 is still working as messages are showing on the LCD and the modded flubber / ROX MY BOX messages are showing correctly.

Tried several times to get the dashboard to switch back to XBMC4Gamers without luck, so swapped the hard drive for a 2.5" 512Gb SSD I had set up for a slim I made a while ago that's not working and boom, back in business.

 

Fingers crossed it works for a long time yet.

[hastings298]

X3 started to fail to get past the flubber (ROX YOUR BOX message not appearing) - noticed it seemed to get worse when closing up the shell. Guessed it was something pressing on something? Couldn't figure it out, eventually got to the point where it wouldn't boot into Live either.

Took a look at the IDE cable and... the tiniest little tear in it. Everything is working flawlessly now. WTF...

[bulkchart32]

On 12/15/2020 at 9:32 AM, hastings298 said:

X3 started to fail to get past the flubber (ROX YOUR BOX message not appearing) - noticed it seemed to get worse when closing up the shell. Guessed it was something pressing on something? Couldn't figure it out, eventually got to the point where it wouldn't boot into Live either.

Took a look at the IDE cable and... the tiniest little tear in it. Everything is working flawlessly now. WTF...

these are perfect 80 wire replacement cables for the og xbox. https://chimericsystems.com/collections/uncategorized/products/custom-xbox-ide-cable

[hastings298]

On 1/28/2021 at 4:05 PM, bulkchart32 said:

these are perfect 80 wire replacement cables for the og xbox. https://chimericsystems.com/collections/uncategorized/products/custom-xbox-ide-cable

can these be purchased in the UK?

[bulkchart32]

On 2/5/2021 at 7:57 AM, hastings298 said:

can these be purchased in the UK?

i don't know. i live in the usa. u can look at the page and see. other 80-wire cable will work fine. but the one i posted is a perfect replacement in length, space between connecters, and stiffness to the oem.

Edited March 6, 2021 by bulkchart32