Alright! So roughly six months ago I was ripped off by a guy on Craigslist, I bought a 360 from him got it home to find the E74 errors. I eventually just bought a new one, and was out the cash as I could never find the guy again. I was never able to find legit information on the E74 problem beside the fact that it more then likely dealt with the ANA / HANA chip.

After fixing hundreds of 360's now, I thought I'd post my little solution for the E74 problem.

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What you need:

Stuff to open the 360
Basic X-Clamp replacement stuff (follow the other tutorials on how to do this)
Heat gun
Patience

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Ok so here we go:


My workspace


The E74 Error on the current box


Heres the box with the problems


Case off, remove all of the screws, including the little black ones on the RF unit and for the x-clamps


Unplug the SATA and DVD power cables, unplug the fans


Now we have a good look at the chip cuasing all of the problems. Sits directly above the GPU. It's the video scaler chip aka ANA / HANA chip.


And another photo of it


here's a view from the bottom


And another view


Close up of the ANA chip


Here's my el-cheapo heat gun, you can pick up one in the paint section of lowes or home depot.


Heatgun box


Remove the X-clamp from the GPU, take the bolts out of the heatsink


I like the goo gone gel, it works wonders for taking off the stock heatsink goop. Just make sure to clean the area with rubbing alcohol afterward.


Clean the GPU off


Clean the heatsink off


Use the higher percentage rubbing alcohol


Apply artic silver, do the standard X-Clamp fix.


Now the parts we need exposed (underneath the stock x-clamp) are accessible.


OK, so put your heatgun on a medium setting and start apply heat to the marked areas. KEEP THE GUN MOVING you don't want to burn the parts. This will cuase the solder joints to reball themselves (hopefully). Concentrate on the area linking the GPU and the ANA chip.



The motherboard is going to be HOT. Let it cool down. Put the fans and the fan shroud back in, and test it out.


Woohoo!


Nice.

Now if this doesn't work the first time, don't fret. Keep trying, you may need up the heat on your heat gun or give the board more exposure. After you get the 360 running,

keep the case off for a bit, play a few games and see what happens. Some 360's are worse off then others, and may require you to go through the steps again (if the E74 returns).

Do you know the solution on how to fix the E73 error?

This has to do with frying the ethernet chip, usually from people doing the stupid towel trick and overheating components that were not supposed to be hot. You could replace it.

You should cover any exposed parts that don't need to be heated with aluminum foil (lots of it), such as cylinder capacitors, fan socket, eject and sync buttons, etc. There are already a bunch of heat gun threads on these forums.

Nice tutorial I have been kind of doing the same with my E74...
At first I tried to take pressure on the ANA-chip with a stack of cents this didnt work for long so I heatgunned it and since then it works again...
However I must critisize something which just came to my mind, I guess doing the X-Clamp replacement and applying arctic silver before heatgunning it is a bad idea.
Well, why?

Arctic silver is only supposed to be used up to a maximum heat of 120°C which is easily reached if you want to soften the solder(to reflow it you need a 225°C I guess). I am not sure in which way it changes the way the thermal compound operates but I guess it will rather harm than do any good.
As you dont completely reflow anything the X-CLamp replacement should be quite OK but if you do actually really reach the melting point of the leadfree solder, the pressure will push the whole GPU onto the mainboard which would destroy the solder balls and flatten them-> The mainboard would be trash...

Apart from this the tutorial is very detailed and helpful, maybe you can edit this

Wow, I didn't even notice that. You should never heat gun your board when the heatsink is on the chip, and you should also be heating the underside of the board as well as the GPU itself.

Ok yeah, I guess it's always just worked for me so I haven't even thought about that!

My reasoning on this was the following:

1) The problem which seems apparent to me is that the connection between the GPU and the ANA chip comes undone cuasing the E74 error.

2) Just as with the X-Clamp fix, the connections themselves seem to appear unneath where the previous X-Clamp was

3) With the re-applied pressure of heatsink on the GPU being pressed down w/ the machine screws it would hopefully hold the parts in place WHILE its being re-heated.

I just have a feeling that its the actually more to do with the GPU's incomplete connection to the ANA chip that cuases the E74; I've noticed after people overheat the GPU or get the 3 RLOD the E74 becomes much more prevelent. In addition to this, I have a hard time buying that the ANA chip gets hot enough to break solder joints (thus proving the penny method is sort of inapplicable), leading me to believe the problem area is that of the connections UNDER where the previous x-clamp was.

I could be totaly off base, just some assumptions I made. Thanks for the input. Brandogg, any ideas on this? I havent had anybody else to bounce stuff off of.

I would venture to say most ANA/HANA problems are caused as you described them, GPU-side. I fixed a no-video error using the heat gun as well, and never went anywhere near the ANA chip on my board with the heat.

How long do you heat the area up for?

Not very long. Maybe 1 minute altogether tops - the idea is that you gradually heat up the board, just don't go blasting 1000F right away. First heat the bottom of the board, moving the gun in small circles or waves, slowly getting a little bit closer/warmer, then do the same to the top - first around the GPU, then on the chip itself. You need to keep the system still while you do this - place it on some type of rack or between 2 chairs or something so you can quickly switch between the top and bottom of the board.

e74 has nothing to do with the ana/hana chip. i have fixed it everytime (100% of the time) by reflowing the gpu.

Well, you got lucky then, in my case it was definitely a pin of the ANA-chip which lost contact because pushing it onto the mainboard made the 360 boot...
When I moved my finger away the screen got weird artifacts over the whole screen and the color changed slightly
And I did not take it under enough pressure to make the GPU balls get contact again(nothing like the penn-fix or so) and I did the X-Clamp replacement like 2 month before which fixed it the first time.
So it might have been the GPU in the first place but it was definitely the ANA-chip when it failed the second time...

I think its been pretty well established that the E74 Error has to do with the connection between the ANA / HANA / failure of the Scaler Chip to the GPU

Nice tutorial, Anyone know where to get a ANA chip heatsink from?

You'd have to figure out how to attach it too... but I don't think its the ANA chip thats really getting to hot, i'm fairly certain its from the GPU getting really hot and melting the connection between the two...

I used these they are perfect for the whole mainboard...
There are 8 in each pack.
I put one on each RAM block and one on the southbridge and combined 4 of them to "build" a bigger heatsink that perfectly covers the ana-chip
They are cheap and work very well.
I bought my copper heatsinks for 2.90€ which is approx 5 US$ aluminium costs a bit less
Here is the link http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/2005/coolers...-C002526BGA.htm

Followed this tonight and it worked a treat

-=AD=-

Glad to hear it. When I initially tried to find info on how to fix the e74, there was little to nothing to go off of.

Just to confirm one point.

You use the Heat Gun on the motherboard with the Heat Sinks ON??? or OFF???

B

OFF is better as the thermal compound cant be used for temperatures higher than 120°C and if you heat it up too much the pressure might flatten the solderballs below the GPU which would wreck it, on the pictures he had them ON though

Kewl. Thanx

On another note, I am glad to see confirmed that using Goo Gone is a good thing.

One of the hardest part of doing the 3RROD fix (at least for me) was the finger-breaking cleaning of the old Heat Sink compound using alcohol.. I came across a little can of Goo Gone Extreme in my wife's cleaning cupboard. What took me almost 20 mins to do with alcohol, I can do in 2 mins with the Goo Gone. And the results are 20 times better..

My only concern was that the strong cleaner in the Goo Gone might harm the structure or the circuitry of the GPU and CPU. But I haven't seen any thing like that. Knock on wood..


Thanx again.

B

Just clean the googone residue off w/ alcohol afterwards

That's exactly what I do for the exact reason..

We must think alike..

I am sooo sorry for you.


B

Hi I am very interested in this method as I think it will solve my e74 error that has been troublesome to fix.

I was just wondering approximately what temperature the board must reach for this to work and what temperature would be TOO much? I have a heatgun but I think I might pick up an infrared thermometer for doing this. Thanks for any input

You just need the temp to get hot enough to melt the solder points, mine has two settings, both work, you just have to be careful to keep the gun moving so it doesnt burn the board / other parts.

I fixed my second 360 using this method it works very well
I started using my heatgun with the lowest step which is around 300°C to "warm" it up...
After like a minute I switched to 500°C and did this another 2-3 minutes
When you see the capacitors shaking you can decrease the temperature to 300°C and let it cool down for half an hour.
After it cooled down the solder of the area looked a bit different it had a yellow/golden shine
I did this twice once for the upper side and after cooling down the bottom...
360 works flawless, I will keep you updated

Wow, if your solder turned yellow, you probabley heated it too much - solder will still conduct in this state, but it is inhibitted somewhat... just my two cents...

On a side note, I just performed this fix today after figuring out some of it on my own... wish the SEARCH function of this forum would work decently... But thanks for the write up on the tutorial!

I just wanted to make sure that everything was liquified.
However it is quite hard to figure it out as you dont really see it when it does, the only sign is that the capacitors either start smoking or that the capacitor shakes when you move the heatgun.
This xbox was a quite hopeless one anyway so I didnt really have anymore I could do besides the oven trick but now it is working and will hopefully never die again

The caps started "shaking"???

That's my biggest issue with the Heat Gun.. I never know how much is enough. I am always worried about frying something, so I am pretty sure I use it too little..

What I have done is to use my heat gun (WAGNER Model #0283015 one setting ON) about an inch or so off the MB, using circular motions and concentrating on the selected area of the MB (NIC area for E-73, Ana/GPU for E-74, etc etc)..

But it has never fixed the problem..

So, you say I should look for the caps to start "shaking".. Could you give me a bit more detail??

Thanx


B

I used the heatgun in the same way as you but I warmed it up with the first setting and switched then to the second(500°C)
Well when the solder melted the capacitor is kind of swimming in the solder and as you are moving the heatgun around the whole time it kind of vibrates and slowly moves a bit because of the airflow.
You can compare it to a ripple of water when you blow at it...
You gotta stop then because otherwise it might move too far and then you will have to put it back in place...
it really takes a while so be patient and keep watching the bigger capacitors...
I guess I overdid it though because the color of the solder changed so be careful.
When I get my next E74 I will record a video...
The area depends as well putting pressure on the ana-chip fixed my first 360 so I concentrated on the ana-chip which fixed it.
This one was different though nothing brought it back to life so I heatgunned the area from the whole anachip over to the GPU from both sides.
After that it worked finally

That's essentially what I did - I heated the ANA chip and both side of the GPU, using circular motions about an inch or two off the board. I used alot higher setting than you guys did however - my heat gun goes anywhere from 300 - 1350C - I switched mine to the 1200 setting and only hit my board with it for about 1 minute total time between both sides of the GPU and the ANA chip - make sure to KEEP THE GUN moving or else stuff will fry - I never waited to 'see' the solder melt, I just assumed it would and that 1 minute at that high of a setting would be more than enough.

My settings may have been overkill, but you want solder to only be heated for a small amount of time or the discoloration will occur, so I pretty much just guaranteed that I could bring it up to melting temp very quickly.

...again, just my two cents.

Good luck everyone!

1350C?! That's insane! That kind of heat would destroy just about anything in it's path. Anyway, make sure you cover all the capacitors, eject/sync buttons, fan header, etc, with several layers of aluminum foil.

Yeah that sounds outrageous doesn't it? I was in a hurry typing yesterday - I meant 1350F (which I believe is something like 732C or somethin like that). If it was 1350C the gun would more than likely melt in my hand and cause me to spontaneously combust So the 1200F setting is about 648C.

Sorry for the typo

I told my brother how to do this over the phone to fix his xbox.

It already had the xclamp mod that I did to it... So took off the heatsink of the gpu and tin foiled around everything except the blue area in jimwross' picture below:



He had an old heat gun that only had low or high setting so I told him use low.

He heated in circular motions around the blue but focused most of the time on the red square, all for a total of 3 mins. Hooked it back up after an hour and it works! Did not need to heat the top.

Thanks everyone I think this is the best fix for E74 errors!!! Hairdryer on ana chip is only temp fix

If I did it I would have taken pictures but I only told how to do it over the phone so I don't have any, sorry.

Does anyone know if this will work for error codes like 0020? In theory it should work since blasting the bottom of the board with the heat gun would reball the solder, but has anyone used this tutorial for any other general 3RLOD error codes?

Great man, I'm glad to hear it worked out for you! It is so frusterating that theres no other information out there on how to fix this problem :-)

The heat gun permanently (Okay it's been about 3 months so far) fixed my 0020, 0102, E74 (occasional) and "no video" errors.

I have that error code and I cant seem to get rid of it with the x-clamp or the penny fix. How did you go about using your heat gun on your 0020 360?

Use the same process outlined above.

Hello everybody. A few days ago I was playing and everything looked...not fuzzy, but choppy...not sure how to describe it. A day after that I got the E74 error, and my next few tries turning it on kept turning up the E74 error. Then, something else happened, it would start up like normal, but with a blank screen. After about 30 seconds, the fan would get louder, and louder, and louder, until the xbox over heated and the fan shut off(which doesn't make sense really...that should be when the fan gets louder) and then the only thing to do was turn it off and google the problem. Would this possibly fix that? or should I get a new AV cable or something? SHould I try the RROD fix?(already done it once before a few months ago actually)

Thanks bro

Great info jimwross. I am glad you decided to share this with us. Nice picutres and tut.

The chips dont have good contact with the chip dies, this can be cause by too many/few washers and too much/not enough thermal compound(size of a rice grain is perfect)
as the fans get louder it will for sure be the cpu heatsink as the cpu regulated the fanspeed.
If this doesnt fix the overheating issue you will have to do the same procedure for the GPU heatsink.
The E74 is a pretty weird error it might happen that you keep turning your 360 on and off and after like ten tries it boots up but the screen is covered by artifacts and the colors change until the screen is nearly black...
It can be caused by a faulty av-cable according to the faq but if you can see the E74 error message on the screen your av-cable will be fine.
So it will either be a pin of the scaler chip that has lost contact or a broken trace between the gpu and the ana-chip.
Just follow this tutorial it will fix it but make sure that you remove the gpu heatsink and the termal compound before doing that and that you isolate the capacitors in the area as they will blow at this high temperature.

I still can't seem to get this right..

Basically I am looking at two choices now...

Take a totally fracked up MB and use the Heat Gun on it until it melts or catches fire or whatever. This will show me exactly how much heat the MB can take. I know that paper burns at 451f (thanx to Ray Bradbury.. )

Another, less destructive option, is to pick up a Infrared Thermometer and get the chips/MB up to the required temp.. If I go this option, what would the desired temp be?? I also see reasonably priced Infrared Thermometers that measure up to 1000f. Would that be sufficient??

Thanx

B

If you have replaced the X-Clamps try loosening the screws. The way I always trouble shoot this problem is the following:

1) Take the motherboard out of the metal case
2) Hook up the DVD drive and the RF / Power button board
3) Turn it on

If it doesnt give you the 2 Red Lights / Fans speeding up and turning off, then you know has something to do with loosening / tightening / mis-allignment of your x-clamp fix.

SO when you re-assemble the box, try putting the board back in to the metal case and leaving out the two middle LONG screws that attach the top plastic piece. For whatever reason this seems to help if you get a stubborn 360 that keeps doing the 2 red light thing.

Hope this helps.



Hey.

You will start to notice slight colorization on the solder points (goldish color), thats how I tell when its good to go. The board can take quite a bit as long as you don't get it close to the stuff that can melt / be destoryed (capacitors and plastic pieces), you really don't have to be over-cautious with it.



Agreed. I wish i could edit my original post and change the heatsink thing around.

Oh well

The desired temp is a little bit higher than the melting point of the leadfree solder that they used which is 217-218°C(422.6-424.4°F)
Some more info can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solder

Thanx to both of ya..


B

I have had the E74 error for a few weeks now. I didn't know there were user fixes for it before now.

I started to notice problems while playing a game rental, fairly scratch tbh and was getting Unplayable Disc errors, I would have to open and close the tray a coupel of times, on each gaming session for it to boot. The following day when I was playing I had weird squares and couloured stuff pop in on my screen, it locked up I reset it and have had the E74 message displayed ever since.

It is highly unlikely to be the AV cable, I have both a VGA and Component cable and have tried them both with the same result.

I've been recommended to checkout the X-Clamp and airgun fix (will a larger hairdryer do the trick btw?), but just wanted to outline the issues before the problem appeared, just in case there is something else worth considering...

I mentioned this problem on a nother, though not so technical forum and was recommended to replace the DVD drive as it was believed to be casuing the E74 message. Someone else promptly jumped in and claimed that was not possible and recommended me to here.

If I can get it back up and running before the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, I'll be well chuffed. I have no experience with this sort of thing though.

I had those weird squares and lines then e74 after reset... and heating the ana chip with a hairdryer only fixed my xbox for 1 day. Hairdryers have a safety cut off switch at 140F (60C). This only expands the solder to allow play for a day or so until it cools back where it was. You need to reflow the solder using this guide (remove the gpu heatsink) using a heat gun. As has been stated before, the lead free solder melts at 423F (217C). I only had to heat gun the bottom side. Please follow the first post by jimwross but remove the gpu heatsink before heat gun.

Yeah, that all sounds rather too much for me. I'll read it over and try and familiarise myself with the process though.

If it is the scaler chip, which can be determind by applying pressure to the chip then booting, and if it works at that point, then this confirms it is the scaler chip. Is it not just possible to somehow keep that pressure on the chip at all times once the case has been put back together, or is it really necessary to gut out everything and get a heatgun going?

I am thinking of putting the 360 back in its original white casing, and sending it off to MS and hopefully they just replace it without question for me. I suppose worst case scenario is that they send the console back to me not fixed if they notice the warranty seal has been broken.

The whole reliability fiasco has really gotten me on a downer though, this is my 4th console, and I always wanted a black one to match my gear. I hanged on for ages and after 12 months of owning it I decided to replace the case, some 5 months later I get this problem.