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[evilwise]

My 360 went RROD a while ago and I ground down the supports in the bottom of the chassis, drilled out the clamp clip holes, placed 1/4" foam under the processors, flattened out and ground down the original x-clamps, spaced everything with the proper washers, put cut up and sanded down slips of credit cards around the edges of the processors, replaced the thermal paste, and screwed it all together with screws sticking out of the bottom of the chassis. Even after that I had to set the tension juuuuuuust right (about 1/4 turn less than max, except on the corner of the gpu closest to the eject button which wants to be a bit tighter) and overheat it to get it to work. It worked pretty well for a few months but now I have to re-tension and overheat the beast almost every day to get it to behave itself while I play. This usually takes 35-45 minutes off of my gaming time which kind of sucks.

Now, I know that the issue is that there's a broken solder joint near that eject-button corner of the GPU and that all I'm doing is tensioning it to where it makes decent enough contact. The overheating seems to only make like a cold joint that just the vibration of the DVD drive or the cooling fans breaks loose after some amount of hours. I have a heat gun but because of how I've put it together (with the heat sink bolts protruding out of the bottom of the chassis) it would be quite an operation to get access to the underside of the board.

So my question is, is it safe to apply heat directly to the heat sink to transfer that heat all the way to the legs of the chip? I'm sure that the chip would get hotter than the legs and the legs need to get to about 260 degrees right? Is this going to damage the chip? How much of a risk am I running of shorting out legs? I'm not about to remove and resolder the gpu so that would be the end of this 360. What kind of temperature should I get the heat sink to if I try this operation?

[Mholt215]

This has nothing to do with your post really, and Im sorry. But I just realized that I want to try and actually remove the GPU and resolder it properly.. lol

[evilwise]

Okay so.. Does anybody actually have an answer to this question?

[Juvenal1228]

this would be the worst thing to do because the pressure from the heatsinks would collapse the solder balls and bridge every connection on the GPU.

[whyexactly]

this... is a terrible idea. If you're going to use a heatgun, don't have extra pressure on the GPU as like Juneval said, you run the risk of crushing everything together. That plus you would be making the heatsink hotter than the GPU, which means even after you stop applying heat the heatsink is still cooking your GPU, as well as everything else covered by the GPU, which you really don't want when there is any pressure on the board as this will cause the RAM chips under the heatsink to lift, among other parts.

In short, take it apart fully and heatgun it right or don't do it at all. IMO all this pieces of credit card and flattened X clamp nonsense is overkill.

[WorldFormula]

Yea, what they said. You really couldn't heat it up past where the console could heat itself up so you might as well take the thing apart and do it that way, but don't over-do it. http://forums.llamma.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=30456 - Its extensive, but it works.