Everything started a while ago, sd card stopped working properly with error "sd card unexpectedly removed", then wifi begins to drop connection.
Nothing to lose, i thought. I read that baking helped some G4 users. Disassembled the phone, took out motherboard and put it in an oven for 7mins (185C/365F)
Results: It worked! Sd card works fine, wifi is good. But effect lasted only for 4 days =). This morning I’ve got "sd card unexpectedly removed" again. Wifi is still working though.
This is my experience I’d like to share.
PSA: I've googled much for sd-card and wifi issues with g3, and if you've experience any of these: sdcard, sim card, wifi, display issues - it's the beginning of the end. You'd better start looking for a replacement.
Also, I’d strongly recommend you not to buy used G3. The risk you'll get phone that won't last long is very high.
(sorry for poor english)
Hi mate, sorry to read this story, but exactly same situation happrned with my fiancee g3. Exact the same order of things, i was also trying to bake it but it didnt helped.
PS. It was also bought 2nd hand.
This makes no logical sense at all. Could someone please explain to me what you think baking the mainboard does?
The only possible reason for doing this that I can think of is to dry it out if it got submerged in water for an extended period of time. However, the phone naturally gets hot enough to evaporate any internal moisture quite quickly so there goes that theory.
I think what is happening for the strange folks that do this, is just the process of disassembling and reassembling the phone cleans up the ribbon connections and helps dirty contacts.
I strongly recommend no one with any common sense bake their mainboard.
The only possible reason for doing this that I can think of is to dry it out if it got submerged in water
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The idea is to reflow solder joints. (at least google says so =)
think what is happening for the strange folks that do this, is just the process of disassembling and reassembling the phone cleans up the ribbon connections and helps dirty contacts.
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No. The phone was reassembled millions times before with no such effect. And it never been in water.
Anyway, this is quite popular recipe to "fix" G3 and G4. I'm not claiming it will help. Just share my experience.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LGG3/comments/550a3u/just_bake_it_in_the_oven/
https://www.reddit.com/r/LGG3/comments/5e0nx7/info_for_those_thinking_about_baking_their/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikFbhcyO3Nk
UvarovG said:
The idea is to reflow solder joints. (at least google says so =)
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Yea, sorry, you can't believe everything you see on the internet. Even this! lol. But, anyone experienced in soldering will tell ya that to repair a bad solder you need to remove all existing solder, re-apply flux, and re-solder (usually on a room temp bread board! lol). If you just re-heat existing solder you will usually increase resistance and weaken the solder contact even more.
Furthermore, I'm not aware of any solder points on the G3 board that sustain any kind of wear or movement. AND, when you bake the board you're also baking the SoC! :crying: If you got bad solder contacts because of overheating, then your SoC is probably fried anyways.
Whole thing smells bad to me, and I caution others to stay away from this.
There might not be enough heat inside a mobile phone to melt the solder joints, however the continuous stress from heating up and cooling down will weaken the crystaline structure and eventually make the solder joint break.
If you can manage to apply flux to the cracked solder you can usually recover the joint by reflowing it, however in case of BGAs (Ball Grid Array) microchips with hundreds of contacts (balls), where all solder joints are "sandwiched" between the PCB and chip , it's very hard to do so without the access to professional tools.
Reflowing in a household oven is usually just a temporary fix, as no flux manages to reach the broken joint, so all you do with reflowing is melting the cracked solder, which will stay weakend after cooling down again. New cracks in the crystaline structure will form pretty quickly. That's why baking will make the device work for a limited period of time.
The use of less reliable / proven solder compositions (aka leadfree vs leaded solder) also plays a role in this. Leaded solder is usually superior to lead free solder in regards to long time solder joint stability.
A better type of fix would be to reball the BGA, however this usually involves the ues of special tools. When you reball a chip you remove it from the circuit board (usually using hot air) and remove all the old weakend solder and put new, healthy solder blobs (balls) on the chip and then reassemble it.
Cheers.
AlwaysLucky said:
Yea, sorry, you can't believe everything you see on the internet. Even this! lol. But, anyone experienced in soldering will tell ya that to repair a bad solder you need to remove all existing solder, re-apply flux, and re-solder (usually on a room temp bread board! lol). If you just re-heat existing solder you will usually increase resistance and weaken the solder contact even more.
Furthermore, I'm not aware of any solder points on the G3 board that sustain any kind of wear or movement. AND, when you bake the board you're also baking the SoC! :crying: If you got bad solder contacts because of overheating, then your SoC is probably fried anyways.
Whole thing smells bad to me, and I caution others to stay away from this.
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Might as well bake away...because the phone is going to be dead soon anyway.
It's probably not a wear/movement issue - it's an LG quality issue. They had a bad run of boards that made it into the field. Anything from board contamination/improper handling, poor soldering techniques, bad solder, etc. can cause faulty solder joints that fail over time as the soc heats and cools over and over. Better R&D and higher quality standards at the manufacturing plants should prevent issues like this, but hey - sh*t happens sometimes. At least we didn't have the G4 bootloop issue caused by... "After a prolonged investigation, LG has identified the source of the problem as a “loose contact between components” and vowed to repair it..." http://www.androidauthority.com/lg-admits-g4-bootloop-problem-hardware-fault-669603/
Some people "fixed" their issues temporarily by either: a)putting tape on strategic parts of the board which then creates enough pressure when the phone is reassembeld to temporarily "fix" the faulty solder joint(s); or b) by - frighteningly (but doing so as a last resort, so I get the reason for trying it) - baking the mother board for another temporary "fix" of the faulty solder joints. And yes, from personal experience trying to repair a friend's phone, it does actually work for a short time until the solder joints fail again.
I agree with you that the only way to truly fix it is to remove the old solder, clean everything up, reflux and resolder - but that isn't cost feasible for most people who don't have a bga solder machine laying around. Bottom line is once the G3 acts up and re-soldering is the only way to bring it back to life - it's time to start shopping for a new phone.
startswithPendswithOOH said:
Might as well bake away...because the phone is going to be dead soon anyway.
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Yes, and you will kill it much faster by baking it at 185C to soften the lead-free solder. If you do that, you will ruin the SoC which is only meant to handle temps up to 80C. Not to mention you will increase electrical resistance at the solder points.
I know, that would be sooo cool if this had any kind of possibility of doing any good at all. But, the science and physics is simply not there. This is an old-wives tale, a myth, a hoax. Call it what you will, but never encourage anyone to do this. Ever.
AlwaysLucky said:
Call it what you will, but never encourage anyone to do this. Ever.
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Agreed. Never bake electronics. It's common sense.
Now if the phone is dead anyway and someone has nothing to lose & wants to give it a shot that's up to them, but even if it does help it won't be long lasting. Just buy a new phone and save the frustration.
relevant link https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5tw0ev/fix_your_nexus_5x_by_tossing_the_board_in_the_oven/
While using an "oven" to solder components is an actual technique, it's certainly not done in a home oven, and certainly not done the way most of those guides show.
I have repeated countless times in countless LG G3 threads with issues but no one wants to listen -- DO NOT PUT YOUR MOTHERBOARD IN THE OVEN.
This is not actual, proper repair steps. You might get lucky, and start working for a few days, and then it will be worse. As explained by many others in this thread, if not done properly, you will only further weaken the bad solder connections.
It has been caused that problems in the phone are caused by connections getting loose/overheating over time. Not all phones are prone to it, and surely use scenario will have something to do with it.
A better repairing technique for this would be applying pressure with a thermal pad to the SoC. This technique can also be found in many places around the forum. Another small non-conductive piece like paper or plastic from an old debit card would work as well, but thermal pads are best suited so they can help with the heat dissipation.
@UvarovG linked a great thread with a lot of relevant content in it if you are actually interested in learning.
Here are some links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shn7LdIrViQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AcEt073Uds
And others.
So I've recently run in to a water damage issue with my v20 (Thanks UPS). I've had the phone apart to look for water and more importantly corrosion and got lucky - no damage to the phone. Although the marker indicating damage has been triggered.
I didn't realize the SoC used thermal paste to cool the chip/ram. Does anyone have any idea if this stuff needs replaced similar to a processor's thermal paste? Also, if so, will a (dry) processor paste be a suitable counterpart?
Thanks guys!
Dry paste? Do you mean the flat stuff you can buy in various thicknesses that's often used on graphics cards? That wouldn't be suitable.
You need a wet paste that will easily spread thinly when compressed, the internal tolerances of the chassis are minimal.
rubiicon59 said:
Dry paste? Do you mean the flat stuff you can buy in various thicknesses that's often used on graphics cards? That wouldn't be suitable.
You need a wet paste that will easily spread thinly when compressed, the internal tolerances of the chassis are minimal.
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Dry in the sense of more or less viscosity. Anywho, thanks for the response.
Hi!
It suddenly rebooted once, I thought the LineageOS was too much for it since I have upgraded it a month ago (maybe two)
Then I had troubles downgrading to a stock FW which was a Lollipop 501 if I'm right. I had to restart the procedure with Odin 2-3 times until it worked.
To be able to get through the initial setup I had to let the phone rest for an hour to let it cool down.
I'm guessing the soldering between the board and the chip got loose or the contacts are imperfect because of the constant overheating.
Can it be? Would a threatment with a heat gun solve this? My PS4 was damaged because of bad cooling / overheating and I could repair it with the heat gun before. Easy-peasy.
It was borrowed from a friend living faaaar away, hence I haven't tried it with the S4 yet. I'm not sure tho' if I can use such a heat on a tiny phone board as on a much bigger PS4 board. (Even the cpu is bigger than the whole mobo of the phone)
One thing is sure, a hair dryer - with maximum heat dead close for 5 minutes - didn't do the trick But that's not even close to the performance of a heat gun.
Thanks!
Hair dryers don't get hot enough to melt solder. A heat gun would work but you have one big issue to overcome: the heat shield. You have to remove the heat shield from the motherboard, then wrap the entire board except the SoC in aluminum foil before applying the heat gun. However, I don't believe a heat gun will help you in this case.
I would get the device checked out by someone who repairs smartphones before attempting to take the device apart to apply the heat gun. The symptoms you are having are not consistent with a SoC lifting from the board.
Strephon Alkhalikoi said:
Hair dryers don't get hot enough to melt solder. A heat gun would work but you have one big issue to overcome: the heat shield. You have to remove the heat shield from the motherboard, then wrap the entire board except the SoC in aluminum foil before applying the heat gun. However, I don't believe a heat gun will help you in this case.
I would get the device checked out by someone who repairs smartphones before attempting to take the device apart to apply the heat gun. The symptoms you are having are not consistent with a SoC lifting from the board.
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thanks!
what else can it be? i can do a thing or two with electronic devices even if i don't have exact training in the field in question. let's put it this way: if you tell me what to do i can do it. also the board has got about 5 bigger parts and a bunch of small ones. it isn't "rocket surgery"
i don't know about heat shield, i removed the mobo and it looks just like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Samsung_Galaxy_S4_I9505_mainboard.jpg
my second thought is that the memory (call it whatever you want) is at its lifecycles end? (too many read/writes, stuff like that?)
it isn't about software that's for sure. as the lcd works i can just buy another s4 broken in two with working mobo and deal with it that way. faster and seems easier (maybe also cheaper) if the heat gun thing wouldn't work.
The side of the board where the SIM card and MicroSD card slots are is the heat shield I was referring to. The card slots are actually stuck to the top of the shield using adhesive. Underneath that shield is the SoC and flash memory. In order to get the board to appear like the picture you likely removed the heat shield.
As to what it could be? A faulty surface mounted component on the board, but without a tech to diagnose it there's no way to know which component failed. If you can frankenstein one good phone out of two, assuming both phones are the same model, I would. The cost to repair it simply isn't worth it today.
Strephon Alkhalikoi said:
The side of the board where the SIM card and MicroSD card slots are is the heat shield I was referring to. The card slots are actually stuck to the top of the shield using adhesive. Underneath that shield is the SoC and flash memory. In order to get the board to appear like the picture you likely removed the heat shield.
As to what it could be? A faulty surface mounted component on the board, but without a tech to diagnose it there's no way to know which component failed. If you can frankenstein one good phone out of two, assuming both phones are the same model, I would. The cost to repair it simply isn't worth it today.
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yeah that's what i thought.
i think you are wrong with the sim-sdcard compartment. that i have already exchanged once when i had this "no sim card detected phone rebooting" annoying issue. under this sim-sd part is nothing but the plain board with a 2 sided sticky layer. but no chips, no nothing.
but it doesn't really matter since i'll just get a new(er) phone and that's it.
thanks anyway for the help!
cheers
g
@rigo88: You're most likely right. It was three years ago that I had replaced my SIM card tray, and I'm not about to take my S4 apart again just to check, even though it no longer serves as my daily driver.
I wish you luck with your new device.
I just got my hands on a note 4 snapdragon, known for having issues with heat and emmc things.
Now, i watched many thermal tests on the note 4 and noticed that it does indeed get hot a lot. So, i decided to do a small hardware mod.
I took out the motherboard and noticed the 2 big thermal pads. I removed them and put 2 thermal pads that were better and had the same mm (somewhere in 0.5mm).
Now i've got another idea : make aluminium foil heatsinks at the same mm as the thermal pads and put thermal paste on the cpu.
Would this be a better and more effective way to dissipate heat from the processor?
(as soon as i get my hands on a new motherboard i will do in depth tests regarding cooling methods and so on)
I decided to run Cpu Throttling Test to measure how is the stock thermal performance of the phone and I noticed that it is rather lackluster. After about a minute and half of full cpu load(100 threads option in the program) the processor starts jumping around 800mhz and 1.2ghz, if the load is for a longer amount of time it would likely throttle down to 800mhz completely and keep in mind that this is with only the heat of the cpu, if you are doing something else that is stressing the gpu and storage as well it would throttle harder. Nowadays as you know galaxy s2 is often running on full load due to modern operation systems and apps being pretty heavy.
I had a look at pictures of the motherboard of the phone and instantly noticed a significant design flaw which is what causes the throttling-there is no heatsink over the soc at all. On the pic attached you can see the soc with another fairly big chip next to it(probably the baseband, idk).
I had some copper heatsinks left from a previous project so I decided to try adding them on top of the naked chips with some thermal paste. The size of the copper plates is 15x15mm, thickness 0.3mm.
So I disassembled the phone, removed the circle sticker from the soc, cleaned it and the chip next to it with some isopropyl alcohol then applied a tiny amount of thermal paste to the chips with a plastic spudger. Just a very thin coat. The next step is cleaning the copper heatsinks with isopropyl alcohol and sticking them on top of the chips. You only need to apply thermal paste to the chips, don't bother applying it to the copper heatsinks as well as if you put too much thermal paste and stick the chips it will likely cause a mess and get on the resistors and other components.
After that I applied a small amount of thermal paste to the plastic mid frame where chips would usually fit. Before that I cleaned the spot with a little isopropyl alcohol. I used a picture from ifixit teardown and drew with blue color on the spots where you should put the paste.
Well that is the mod. Now reassemble the phone.
Please keep track of the two little black screws that are securing the mainboard in place and be cautious around your volume and power button flex cables, as they are usually glued with weak adhesive to the plastic frame, so if you pull out the mainboard without wiggling them out of the adhesive first you might accidentaly rip them out or damage them.
And now, for the results. As last time, I did a full cpu load stress test with 100 threads. This time I waited the full 15 minutes and behold, the cpu didn't drop below 1.2ghz at all! This is insane improvement in thermal performance. The program says that the cpu thottled to 91% of the max performance, however that reading is due to the small inconsistency of the ''GIPS'' performance which is due to the difficulty of the load, rather than actual thermal throttling. As for the soc temperature, my rom doesn't seem to read it, I only get the battery temperature which was 35C after the 15 minute stress test. The 50C reading from the program is also wrong, it probably just lists it like that because it can't find a temperature reading for the cpu.
In reality even on stock speeds I feel that the phone runs smoother now. However, there is definitely plenty of room for overclocking now, easily to 1.4-1.6ghz. Unfortunately I'm using @rINanDO 's lineage os 14.1 with emulated storage(android 7.1.2) and there is no kernel with cpu overclock for that version, so I can't test that myself. Although I believe such a kernel will be very useful because this android version runs faster than android 9+ while still supporting nearly all apps.
So to sum it up, the benefits of this mod:
-thermal thottling completely removed
-lower temperatures mean less stress on the silicon and longer device lifespan, which is important as this model is already 11 years old
-plenty of thermal headroom for overclocking and significantly increased performance even on stock speeds
And the requirements for the mod:
-a screwdriver
-thermal paste, preferably non conductive
-two 15x15mm 0.3mm thickness copper heatsinks-I got mine from Aliexpress, a pack of 10 costed me 1.25$. They also come with a generic thermal grease but I don't recommend using it. I guess it will do the job if you don't have any other thermal paste.
-some isopropyl alcohol is also recommended for cleaning the surfaces, for better contact
-maybe a disassembly tutorial, anyway disassembling this phone is fairly easy. If you have no experience take your time
Unfortunately I didn't take pictures while doing the mod, so I hope the generic ifixit disassembly photos and my explanation are enough. The mod is pretty easy and took me around 30 minutes.
Informative
Tried it with alluminium instead (i cut 2 pieces from a pc cooler) and in android 12 it did throttle after 5 and a half min, but i undervolted it to 1175mv at 1200mhz and now it is throttling after 8min 45 sec, used arctic mx2 thermal paste. I didn t tested it before the mod, but i will try some games to see if alluminium really makes a difference. After the phone cools down i will try at 1300mhz, thx for the tutorial.