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[anarchiest]

I thought there used to be a tutorial on xbox-scene for this but i cant seem to find it now, anyone have a link to a tutorial or know if this is possible?

[anarchiest]

i wanted more ram for MAME, alot of the games i want to play like street fighter 1 (96mb) xmen vs street fighter (100something)

is there a tutorial for doing this? what type of ram would i need? any pics of the ram on the mobo?

[EvilWays]

You'd need either:

1) a shitload of money and you'd only be able to get them in orders of 400 chips, or
2) a mobo with a dead NIC or something like that (check eBay)

PLUS, you'd need:

1) an SMT rework station (at least $2.5k)
2) steady hands
3) lots of patience

Best thing to do is to get a mobo from eBay and find someone who is skilled at using an SMT station or is very skilled at using a really fine tipped soldering iron.

This is not for the sqeamish or the novice...

[anarchiest]

so this is not possible then to by RAM chips that are higher and replacing the old ones?

[GuySmily]

My friend's college has a soldering station where I'm going to see about pulling the ram off my old dead mobo for my current one.  I actually don't have a use for it, but at least I'll have done it =p

Ask your college friends (or find out at your own college) if it's possible to get access to a station.

If I ever get around to it I'll write a tutorial.  Other people have talked about this before...  There's a chip desoldering product somewhere that supposedly will work also.

[anarchiest]

the guy that does my mod chips could prob do it, maybe ill ask him

[anarchiest]

what kind of RAM chips are on this board? and how many? how would i get bigger replacments? DDR? Rambus? what would work?

[bleugh]

the ONLY way to add more ram is to

buy a 2nd xbox (broken preferably)

pull its ram chips off

put them in your xbox


there are a fair few posts on how to do this, IT'S NOT THAT EASY TO DO, IT IS VERY EASY TO GET IT WRONG

and besides, there isn't that much point unless you like mame or Linux

[MemphisReins]

Sorry but given the questions asked so far, I think there will be another 'Help, my Xbox mobo is dead' topic comming soon.

What you seem to have failed to realise is that the Xbox isn't a PC. The RAM chips are proprietary and soldered ONTO the motherboard. You can not just buy a stick of DDR and bung it in, or even take the chips off and bung them in, it just doesn't work like that.

[EvilWays]

QUOTE (Morphes @ Aug 15 2003, 06:54 PM)

well it would make ur games run twice as fast, just like a 7200rpm hdd, if the media can be read faster and transferd faster than it shall work faster, therefore more memory means less activity for the HDD which means speed so i would say do it if u can return ur box to EB or whatever

Bad news for ya...it isn't as simple as just tossing in more RAM. Even if you do get more RAM in, games are coded to only use 64MB, tho there is an app that apparently remove that flag. The original purpose for 12MB of RAM in an Xbox was for development/debugging. Debug logs and whatnot would occupy the upper 64MB...

guyincognito: no I haven't tried this yet, and I may find someone that can do it for me. I don't have steady hands, I don't have a rework station, and I don't know if the tech school I attend has a rework station.

[BCfosheezy]

[A.Z.BEST]

(it's really helpfull ). You don't need any soldering station - you need skills. Try yourself by touching anything very small with your soldering pencil/iron. If you're so blind that you can not touch the little legs of the chip, just give it up - you have a potential to destroy your Xbox .

I soldered additional RAM, and I'll try to write a tutorial, but I don't promise it to you.

Soldering took me about 2 hours, but I ate lunch meanwhile and I was doing it slowly and gently . It's not so hard as most of you say. But... soldering is not end of the job. You have to boot your Xbox after doing this . I'm sure that my RAM chips are ok, cause my Xbox booted twice, but I needed to solder it better, cause few legs aren't touching the pads and Xbox gives me a frag. I don't know which legs fail . I'm trying to lend a multimeter from my friends to check it . So now my Xbox is down for a while .

The reason why I did was that I wanted to have full debug Xbox and I need a new pc . Adding RAM to Xbox is much cheaper than buying a new pc... and also I'm proud of myself .

Anyway - just try yourself with soldering some small parts, and then start thinking about adding RAM. Have fun & Good Luck, hehe .

BTW Adding RAM to my Xbox costs me about 10$ .

[GuySmily]

I just got back from my cousin's place and I'm borrowing my uncles heat gun.  I successfully took the ST chip off of a broken controller, and after a bit more practice I'll desolder the ram from my old xbox and see how it goes, and write a tutorial on the heat gun method.  The problem I had was that all the chips around the ST chip came off with it.

[A.Z.BEST]

. I soldered everything perfect, I checked all 400 pins with a multimeter and a magnifying glass. Everything looks fine, but doesn't work fine . I think that the graphic card wasn't overheaten but the RAM chips were fucked . Anyway, here are the pics.







I'm gonna check every pin tomorrow, and if it won't help I'll desolder one chip and solder another chip on it's place until my Xbox will work. Now I'm depressed, cuz I wanna play some game   .

Heh, there's one good thing in all of this . My new pendant: