Inside GIGABYTE Melbourne - Replacing chipsets on motherboards

- Replacing chipsets on motherboards

GIGABYTE are equipped to replace all kinds of chipsets and connectors on motherboards and graphics cards here in Australia with their BGA machines which are worth around $40,000 AUD (around $31,000 USD) a piece - they have a few of them.

These types of machines are not common in Australia but in Taiwan they are probably as common as an Australian gum tree. These machines allow the engineers to physically remove bad chipsets and connectors and replace with new parts. The machine works by first heating up to around 230c and removing the solder. Then there is a cool down phase before the chipset can be removed from the motherboard. The entire process takes around four minutes from heat up to cool down.

The following photos show GIGABYTE's main engineer setting up the BGA machine to remove a faulty Intel Southbridge, an ICH5 chipset.

A few minutes later after the pins have been disconnected from the motherboard and the chipset is simply removed with ease.

In the next set of photos, a new ICH5 Intel Southbridge will be applied to the motherboard. The first step is to clean the location where the chipset will be placed with a special type of cleaning gel which assists in removing tiny solder fragments, which are probably not all that visible to the human eye.

The process to place a new chipset on the motherboard takes the same time as it does to remove a chipset since the same temperature is required for the pins on the new working chipset to be applied to the motherboard.