Samsung 305t / Gateway XHD3000 (& others) DIY repair.

T

thebeephaha

2[H]4U
Joined
May 27, 2007
Messages
2,054
I came across a Samsung 305t with lines and artifacting on the screen. We thought it was just the panel going out but I tore it down to the LCD control board and took a 1000w heat gun to the main processing chip (big silver one in the picture below, same control board the Gateway XHD3000 uses BTW)

70qu7.jpg


I then added a little chipset heatsink and closed it up figuring if it was a heat issue where the solder let go, the chipset heatsink should help prevent future failure.

Low and behold, it works fine now and I get to replace my 2407WFP with something a little bigger. :D

I know this is an older display and is not too common, but to anyone else out there. If you can take about 15min to tear it down and carefully remove the control board and have access to a heat gun. It's well worth it rather than trashing this previously $1000+ display.

This trick works on other LCDs too, I've fixed a Sony display this way as well. I got the idea from people baking their dead video cards bringing them back to life, which I've done quite a few times now.
 
Can you give us some more details? 1000W heat-gun at full blast? and for how long?

It's is kinda of ironic that you have done something that both Samsung and GW refused to do and it was not that hard to do.

Good Job!
 
I did full blast for roughly 3min / or until it smells "hot". I smelled a little solder possibly too, which is what we want for the solder to re-liquify.
 
It's similar to the oven trick - I have a Gateway XHD3000 myself and I had to do that once. I took off that thick TIM pad, bent back the RF shield, and used thermal tape to put an old Northbridge heatsink on the scaler chip. Even then it got too hot, so last weekend I wired up an old 80mm fan to a USB plug (the monitor has lots of USB ports to power it) and used a cable tie to mount it beside the heatsink to blow air across it. Now the heatsink is cool to the touch and I haven't had any problems with the monitor since.
 
Just wanted to add my experience for other users. I have a 305T, and it started artifacting (pink / green, screen flashing bizarrely, etc). When unplugged for a signal, the self-test displays flawless white, red, blue and green fullscreen slides, so I knew the panel was OK.

I searched around on the net, came to the conclusion that the scaler was my problem. Disassembled the monitor in less than 15 minutes, removed the offending board, pulled a sticker off, made some aluminum foil spacer balls, placed balls on baking sheet, board on balls. Baked at 385 for 8 minutes. Cooled for an hour, reinstalled - monitor works flawlessly.

Don't be afraid to do this! You can't even tell the card was in an oven, and it solves the problem - apparently better than a heatgun, which often does not do a complete reflow job. Of course, for long term operation, you do need to come up with an alternate cooling solution, but that's easy as well.

Your 305t is easy to fix - DO IT!
 
I have the XHD3000 and its dying on me blurry screen. Is 4-5 yrs max lifespan for monitors.
 
What kind of heatsink are people putting on the processing chip? how is there any room for that? photo? thanks.
 
Any chance anyone has a walkthrough on taking this off? My 305t has green horazontal bars and would cost 200 bucks to ship and fix I'd like to try this before I take that step.
 
Yep - I did the same thing to my GeForce 8800GTX - baked it in the oven at 385 degrees for 8 minutes. Went from not working at all to fully functional.

I'll have to give it a try on my XHD3000. It is dead, but luckily I purchased it with my American Express and had 2 months left on the additional year warranty (AmEx on most of their cards I believe, will either double the Mfg warranty or add 1 year to the warranty - whichever is less).

I took the monitor into a repair shop and they couldn't do anything with it, so AmEx refunded the full purchase price ($995 from TigerDirect) as well as the $50 technician service fee. They didn't want the monitor, so it now sits in the corner of my office...!
 
I am honestly floored right now. The green lines are completely gone. I cluelessly took apart the monitor found the board that I needed and baked it 375 8 minutes. Burnt myself and put it back it and Kacow works good as new.

Saved me 200 bucks and have my amazing monitor back.
 
I apologize for the thread resurrection!

I have two 305T's that went bad. Luckily, one was still under warranty and Samsung repaired it ... now, a year later, it has begun artifacting again. :( Warranty is done, so I'm going to attempt to repair both of my monitors.

Monitor 1: Artifacting every now and then, but monitor looks perfect most of the time. This occurred last time and the problem quickly became worse. It sounds as if I'll be able to correct the issue with the baking trick. Do you guys think if I cut away part of the shield and affixed a 40x40x20mm to the "ALTERA" chip and ran in to USB, would that fix the problem? Would a 40x40x10mm do the trick or should I get the 20mm for better airflow? I have my eye on this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000QEAXDO/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&smid=A2F13KK758WMXQ

Monitor 2: Has Vertical lines going down 1/4th of the screen. These lines are also on the panel when I unhook it from the PC. SO, I'm guessing this is a different issue, any ideas as to what I could do to correct it?

Thanks, I just hate the idea of throwing these guys out ... they're beautiful when working.
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Monitor 1: Sounds like baking should do it. If you cut away the shield put a heatsink on the chip (a motherboard Northbridge heatsink fits perfectly) as that small a fan may not be enough. I put a much bigger case fan on my 305T:


Untitled by rtangwai, on Flickr

The larger fan is very quiet because it normally uses 12V but I have wired it to the 5V power lead of a USB cable so it runs slower. The larger size means it still pushes a respectable amount of air.

Monitor 2: That could be a bad power supply - the 305T are notorious for bad capacitors in the power supply. Unlike the Gateway XHD3000, the 305T uses an internal power supply. I recently had to replace several capacitors on mine, including the main power cap (which rarely goes bad). The SamYoung brand is known to fail prematurely, you can find reliable replacement kits on eBay for about $20. Do you know your way around a soldering iron? A simple way to test would be to swap the power supplies between your 2 305T's - if the problem sticks to the monitor it's the scaler board, if the problem moves with the power supply you know what's bad. When you remove the power supply (MAKE SURE YOU LEAVE THE MONITOR PLUGGED IN BUT SWITCHED OFF FOR AT LEAST HALF AN HOUR BEFORE YOU UNPLUG IT AND OPEN THE CASE!!!) take a look at all the capacitors to see if any have burst. Check the bottoms as well as the tops - I had 2 bad caps that blew on the bottom, only the power cap blew on the top where the cross is.

There is a much bigger thread on repairing 305T's and XHD3000's here:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1527751
 
My bake fix only worked for about 3 months as the underlining problem is over heating.

So I pretty much did was poster above did......a little less and more ghetto at the same time.


I rebaked it then I put a bunch of small Vram Heat sinks on it then cut a square hole over the area and Hot Glue gunned a Case fan with an AC adapter.....sure the monitor takes up 2 outlets now but it has been working 3 months without issues.
 
This sounds a lot like the towel trick for fixing red ringed first gen 360s.
 
Thanks so much for the response and the pic! I suppose the power supply switch would have been the way to go, but I just switched the artifacting card with the 25% verticle line card and got the 25% vertical block. Which either means both cards have issues or, my suspicion, I didn't put back all four of the ribbons properly (not sure what they're called). I bet that would cause 25% to go out, seeing as there are four of them. Also, 25% is now black and then turns to the correct color and finally begins to fragment in that 25% window.

I'm going to play around with it some more!

I really like your heatsink. I was planning on putting the 40x40x20mm fan directly on the chip, but it probably won't move a lot of air AND a fan that small will be much louder than your solution.

Thanks again for the info and suggestions!
 
Now I'm using the #2 monitor that had 25% of the screen with stripes, but it has the #1 LCD Control Board in it. It is now behaving exactly as it was on the #1 monitor. Therefore, it appears both of the LCD Control Boards are the culprits. I'm going to go ahead and order the heatsink and fan that rtangwai posted, then mount on both of them to see if I can resurrect these puppies.

Thanks again for the help!
 
Still check the capacitors on the power supplies just in case - they are quite notorious, especially because the power supply gets quite hot (probably the reason why Gateway used external power supplies in their version).
 
Hi everyone

Just wanted to share my experiences with this board. Did the oven trick, 7mins in 190celsius, and 1min to 225celsius. Cut a bit away from the holding thingie, added some silver paste on the chip and a heat sink. Hoping this would hold for couple of months.

If you need new boards, I suggest you order them from http://www.iccfl.com/ got mine in couple of days.
 
Heatsink isn't enough, I tried that myself - you have got to put some active cooling on the heatsink. It tried using the entire RF shield as a heatsink and it failed - unless you put on something with a truly massive amount of surface area it won't prevent another failure. Remember, you are not re-balling the chip so the faulty solder is still down there and the way the chip overheats there is way too much thermal energy produced to have a workable passive solution - you want that chip down to room temperature if possible. If you always run at native resolution it *MIGHT* hold up a few months as that puts the least amount of strain on the Altera chip but inevitably (and no one knows when) it will fail again. Too many failures and eventually it will break permanently. I'm not sure the new scaler boards are much better as they have to pass EU certification and they insist on lead-free solder which caused the problem in the first place (too brittle), so for safety's sake you should go with an active cooling solution.
 
rtangwai said:
Heatsink isn't enough, I tried that myself - you have got to put some active cooling on the heatsink.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this, I'll try without a fan and when it fails (again) I'll put one on it to keep it cool. I am always running at full res.

T
 
Sweet! I have one of them working with a perfect picture again. I baked the card at 385º for 8 minutes and then placed a small Northbridge heatsink with fan on it and put it together w/o the back plate on. I'm now going to order a smaller heatsink / fan that will enable me to put the back on again w/o my having to cut it (fans to big now). I also connected a 4pin molex to a USB cable to power the HSF with the molex connector.

I'll do this with my second monitor when the smaller fan comes in!

Just a note: half of my screen was acting very bizarre when I plugged everything back in. I unconnected the two ribbons on the card that corresponded to the distorted picture on my monitor and reseated them ... voila, perfect picture!
 
Hi guys, sorry to resurrect an OLD thread.

Picked up a 305t for $80 with the flickering and rainbow lines. Determined that the graphics chip was to blame and tried to 'bake' it in the oven. (about 350 degrees for less than 8minutes) problem is, my oven is horrible and I have fried the board (5 or 6 of the little resisters fell out and the whole board sagged in the middle).

I put it all back together but no picture whatsoever. I realise the board is screwed. What are my options? Can I order a replacement from somewhere?

Thanks for your help.
 
thebeephaha said:
I came across a Samsung 305t with lines and artifacting on the screen. We thought it was just the panel going out but I tore it down to the LCD control board and took a 1000w heat gun to the main processing chip (big silver one in the picture below, same control board the Gateway XHD3000 uses BTW)

70qu7.jpg


I then added a little chipset heatsink and closed it up figuring if it was a heat issue where the solder let go, the chipset heatsink should help prevent future failure.

Low and behold, it works fine now and I get to replace my 2407WFP with something a little bigger. :D

I know this is an older display and is not too common, but to anyone else out there. If you can take about 15min to tear it down and carefully remove the control board and have access to a heat gun. It's well worth it rather than trashing this previously $1000+ display.

This trick works on other LCDs too, I've fixed a Sony display this way as well. I got the idea from people baking their dead video cards bringing them back to life, which I've done quite a few times now.
Click to expand...

My 305T+ broke the same way, green artefacts and lines down the screen.

I read somewhere putting the board in the oven for an hour sorts it out as well.

Samsung discontinued this monitor before the warranty period expired, they know these monitors are problematic.

I managed to get a part refund, worked out around £330 for a monitor I owned for 4.3 years. Cost me nearly a grand when brand new. Used the cash and put to for a VP2770. Which I am now selling.
 
I have had this problem a couple of times but only had small heatsinks on the chip without a fan..

Now i just wanted to share the success. Of the upgraded heatsink and fan

I used an intel haswell orginal fan and heatsink, as its not to heavy, and for free ;)

It has a nice fanmount and is perfectly quiet @ 5voltd from a modded USB cable connected to the bulit in hub..

The whole thing is glued to the card. With intel original heatpaste inthe middle.. And a little bit if glue around it.. It was pressed down and smeared around a bit until it sticked ;)

So now i just hope to be able to have it some more years until 4k or 8k gets common!!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top