CPU upgrade x10

[Bowlsnapper]

Just now, trencherfield said:

Just had three 1GHZ 133mhz slot 1 Piii's delivered from usa. Look mint, have to see. Need to disable speedstep too of course. Will try the cheaper units first before these when I feel like it.

Don't think it's 1.45v standard Snappy.... else there would be no need to change the VCC_CORE resistor for the 1.4Ghz. I would guess around 1.7v same as these slot 1's for Coppermine.

I'll measure it now for you.

Dude... you are ballin if you just got 3 slot processors. I'm fuckin jealous.

Thank you, sir!.... I need an ACHI...

[trencherfield]

20 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

Dude... you are ballin if you just got 3 slot processors. I'm fuckin jealous.

Thank you, sir!.... I need an ACHI...

 

[Bowlsnapper]

4 minutes ago, trencherfield said:

 

I'm pissed now.

Lol, how much did you end up selling out, if you don't mind me asking. They look like they're All from the same place.

[trencherfield]

3 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

I'm pissed now.

Lol, how much did you end up selling out, if you don't mind me asking. They look like they're All from the same place.

 

[Bowlsnapper]

20 minutes ago, trencherfield said:

 

YOU GOT THEM ALL FOR 117 DOLLARS!?

Now I'm definitely pissed. Lol. Who's the seller?

[big F]

I think I may have one or more of them in my archive.

Interested to see if they work.

[trencherfield]

11 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

YOU GOT THEM ALL FOR 117 DOLLARS!?

Now I'm definitely pissed. Lol. Who's the seller?

Calm down, calm down.... you're gonna pop a vessel or sommet lol

Yeah, that's the total cost for the 3 delivered with vat to UK.

Will take a shot of the seller for you in a mo, hang on. There is 2 on ebay there now...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/383487331659

Presume it's legit, but title a bit odd but does say will receive whats pictured. Different seller. Seller I used has sold out.

 

[Marty]

I've never seen a slot CPU mod for the XBOX....

[trencherfield]

Tested the VCC_CORE on my scruffy workbench v1.0 for you.... reads 1.682v with bulging caps that are about to go pop in my face if I don't do 'em sooner or later.

So should be 1.7v standard as I suspected for coppermines and the 733mhz chip. Pics following...

[trencherfield]

2 minutes ago, Marty said:

I've never seen a slot CPU mod for the XBOX....

Same chip BGA495 ... gotta flow it off the slot one board, then slap it on the xbox with some chewing gum Homer style!

[trencherfield]

seller I bought mine at....

[trencherfield]

26 minutes ago, big F said:

I think I may have one or more of them in my archive.

Interested to see if they work.

Yeah they do. It's the one previously used for 1ghz upgrades. Few extra mods required tho.

https://www.ogxbox.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1299-xbox-cpu-id/

 

[Bowlsnapper]

15 minutes ago, trencherfield said:

Same chip BGA495 ... gotta flow it off the slot one board, then slap it on the xbox with some chewing gum Homer style!

Beat me to it.

[Bowlsnapper]

20 minutes ago, trencherfield said:

Yeah they do. It's the one previously used for 1ghz upgrades. Few extra mods required tho.

https://www.ogxbox.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1299-xbox-cpu-id/

 

I believe Trusty used 1GHZ variations of the processor.

[ShinGoutetsu]

40 minutes ago, Bowlsnapper said:

I believe Trusty used 1GHZ variations of the processor.

He did, I still have my trusty upgraded board

[Bowlsnapper]

17 minutes ago, ShinGoutetsu said:

He did, I still have my trusty upgraded board

I want to do this so bad. It's honestly a dream of mine to do this well enough and quickly and easily enough that I start bringing them back to the market and I am requested to do it constantly. I could die happy doing that every day for people. It would be incredibly rewarding...

[trencherfield]

Pics of test...

[trencherfield]

So for your 1.75v CPU's Snappy, test the board you are fitting them to, if it's a better solid 1.70v reading then you can check the CPU specs online on those cpu websites and see if its okay at 0.05v undervolt okay?

If not, you can prolly adjust the resistor rating very slightly to bring it up a nudge, especially for an overclock.

Hope that helps.

[Bowlsnapper]

3 hours ago, trencherfield said:

So for your 1.75v CPU's Snappy, test the board you are fitting them to, if it's a better solid 1.70v reading then you can check the CPU specs online on those cpu websites and see if its okay at 0.05v undervolt okay?

If not, you can prolly adjust the resistor rating very slightly to bring it up a nudge, especially for an overclock.

Hope that helps.

Yes it does. Thank you for looking into it for me. I may need help with determining which resistors to use for that adjustment, but it lets me know that the 1.75 should just work.

[trencherfield]

https://www.overclockers.com/forums/threads/running-tualatin-with-1-8-volts-safe-or-not.113731/

Reading that, it appears you are all set at 1.7v standard and safer. No need to adjust VCC_CORE.

[zzattack]

Small necro-bump on this project. About a year ago I had started to 'delayer' a n64freak interposer for the purpose of revealing its inner layers, allowing me to scan them for reference and potential recreation. Being unfamiliar with KiCAD there was some interest in learning about it, so as a way to build up experience I began to redraw the schematics from the original FriendTECH. This did not take excruciatingly long since it is mostly a point-to-point hookup between the two CPU footprints, with only very minor circuitry added. I completed the schematic, but after speaking with Kekule who had done a similar exercise I did not persue this effort further, since his files would eventually be released.

Then, when the Kekule interposer gerber release was announced 2 weeks ago, I felt somewhat disappointed that 1) I never completed what I started and still hadn't used KiCAD for layout, and 2) neither schematic nor pcb layout files were released along with the manufacturing files.

Therefore I set out to take a stab at resuming where I left off. Initially I overlayed the delayered scans with the positioned footprints and began to trace them into the copper layers. This went well for the 45° angled signals but eventually grew old quick. Later I found a way to convert the Kekule gerber files into editable paths which I could place into the layout, and after annotating them with the correct schematic nets I ended up with a completed board reasonably quickly. This was to be revision 1, yet another clone of the 20 year old design, now with the benefit of having the actual editable design files along with them. Oh, and the useless clock reduction circuit is chopped off.

Now the original design has the major drawback that the BGA footprint is in the corner of the board, which causes one of the original heatsink bracket mounting holes to be covered, and during reflow the uneven distribution of the weight can cause the interposer to tilt/slant during reflow. In the MakeMHZ discord, user 'doom' had flaunted some pictures of his interposer which was not a clone but a full remake. It looked very very clean, did not have the BGA footprint in the corner, and seemed like an overall massive improvement over the original.

My next challenge would be to offset the BGA pads in a similar way. This would of course require that I re-route the entire board. I was told by Kekule that the FriendTECH routing was absolutely next level and despite him having a lot of PCB engineering experience, he could not get the trace lengths to match up within the requirement of 1/10th inch for all of the data lines. This withheld me from taking a stab at it myself. I've done some PCB design up to 4 layers, but never considered myself expert-level, so I expected this to fail quite miserably. After putting my kids to bed at 9pm I sat down and didn't get up until it was fully routed at 3am. In about 6 hours I drew up what I thought would take me weeks, if I could even do it at all in the first place. The result of that was uploaded as 'revision 2'. I later cleaned up some of the silk screen, ensured no silk screen is printed over the vias, optimized the power planes a little bit and placed an order at JLCPCB for  revision 2.1.

The layout I drew up conforms to quite liberal design specs with 5 mil traces and 0.3mm drills and does not make use of via-in-pad technology meaning that to breakout the BGA signals, a small bit of trace is required and via's are placed in the center of 4 surrounding pads. This complicates routing of course since more real-estate is required for every pad. The advantage of using such design specs is that board houses typically start charging extra for smaller drills, so it can be produced very cheaply: there's a $2 for 5 offer on JLCPCB.

The revision 2.1 board looks very messy compared to the aforementioned clean board made by doom. Looking at it closely, he seems to have made use of via-in-pad technology, allowing to directly break out from the SMD/BGA pads into the desired signal layer. Figuring this would take a ton of money to have produced I looked up a quote at JLCPCB and found that the additional premium is very reasonable actually. I'm considering doing another re-route where I'll aim for a really clean layout while making use of this additional capability.

For now, here's the true open source designs: https://github.com/zzattack/xbox-cpu-interposer

 

 

 

Thanks for reading

 

 

[ShinGoutetsu]

Awesome work!

[Bowlsnapper]

Thank you, buddy  @zzattack

Thank you to N64Freak and Kekule as well.

[Donnie-Burger]

8 hours ago, zzattack said:

Small necro-bump on this project. About a year ago I had started to 'delayer' a n64freak interposer for the purpose of revealing its inner layers, allowing me to scan them for reference and potential recreation. Being unfamiliar with KiCAD there was some interest in learning about it, so as a way to build up experience I began to redraw the schematics from the original FriendTECH. This did not take excruciatingly long since it is mostly a point-to-point hookup between the two CPU footprints, with only very minor circuitry added. I completed the schematic, but after speaking with Kekule who had done a similar exercise I did not persue this effort further, since his files would eventually be released.

Then, when the Kekule interposer gerber release was announced 2 weeks ago, I felt somewhat disappointed that 1) I never completed what I started and still hadn't used KiCAD for layout, and 2) neither schematic nor pcb layout files were released along with the manufacturing files.

Therefore I set out to take a stab at resuming where I left off. Initially I overlayed the delayered scans with the positioned footprints and began to trace them into the copper layers. This went well for the 45° angled signals but eventually grew old quick. Later I found a way to convert the Kekule gerber files into editable paths which I could place into the layout, and after annotating them with the correct schematic nets I ended up with a completed board reasonably quickly. This was to be revision 1, yet another clone of the 20 year old design, now with the benefit of having the actual editable design files along with them. Oh, and the useless clock reduction circuit is chopped off.

Now the original design has the major drawback that the BGA footprint is in the corner of the board, which causes one of the original heatsink bracket mounting holes to be covered, and during reflow the uneven distribution of the weight can cause the interposer to tilt/slant during reflow. In the MakeMHZ discord, user 'doom' had flaunted some pictures of his interposer which was not a clone but a full remake. It looked very very clean, did not have the BGA footprint in the corner, and seemed like an overall massive improvement over the original.

My next challenge would be to offset the BGA pads in a similar way. This would of course require that I re-route the entire board. I was told by Kekule that the FriendTECH routing was absolutely next level and despite him having a lot of PCB engineering experience, he could not get the trace lengths to match up within the requirement of 1/10th inch for all of the data lines. This withheld me from taking a stab at it myself. I've done some PCB design up to 4 layers, but never considered myself expert-level, so I expected this to fail quite miserably. After putting my kids to bed at 9pm I sat down and didn't get up until it was fully routed at 3am. In about 6 hours I drew up what I thought would take me weeks, if I could even do it at all in the first place. The result of that was uploaded as 'revision 2'. I later cleaned up some of the silk screen, ensured no silk screen is printed over the vias, optimized the power planes a little bit and placed an order at JLCPCB for  revision 2.1.

The layout I drew up conforms to quite liberal design specs with 5 mil traces and 0.3mm drills and does not make use of via-in-pad technology meaning that to breakout the BGA signals, a small bit of trace is required and via's are placed in the center of 4 surrounding pads. This complicates routing of course since more real-estate is required for every pad. The advantage of using such design specs is that board houses typically start charging extra for smaller drills, so it can be produced very cheaply: there's a $2 for 5 offer on JLCPCB.

The revision 2.1 board looks very messy compared to the aforementioned clean board made by doom. Looking at it closely, he seems to have made use of via-in-pad technology, allowing to directly break out from the SMD/BGA pads into the desired signal layer. Figuring this would take a ton of money to have produced I looked up a quote at JLCPCB and found that the additional premium is very reasonable actually. I'm considering doing another re-route where I'll aim for a really clean layout while making use of this additional capability.

For now, here's the true open source designs: https://github.com/zzattack/xbox-cpu-interposer

 

 

 

Thanks for reading

 

 

Ordering a 50 pack once you confirm these working.  Thank you for the contribution.

[lOgIcAl]

zzattack that is extraordinary work and is very much appreciated by everyone here no doubt. A lot of effort has gone into that and it should be applauded.

Can I ask, does the via in pad possibly cause any BGA rework issues with the small holes on the BGA points upon melting the solder balls, making it a weaker joint? As in some of the ball going down the via on the pad compared to the other normal pads, meaning a miss match in solder ball height under the interposer board?

Would the hole cause air bubbles to form in the ball as it reaches melting fluidity with the flux too? Pop, then splatter, causing a bridge etc?
 

Edited December 4, 2023 by lOgIcAl