Minor Hardware Issue And Already Fixed It

[Radek]

Hi,

For various reasons I opened my gp2x and noticed something. The MMSP2 chip (the one of only three bigger chips in the gp2x, two others are sdram chips) has few layers of some kind of rubber on it's surface. This rubber is touching the back of lcd's panel. Why is that I don't know. But removing some of it improved stick accuracy and eliminated pressure on the screen. This was making some lcd's distortion (the same like using finger to push lcd's surface) what I was getting when moving the stick.

This is the first thing.

The second is that stick's head is too big at bottom. Remove it (rotate it clockwise and it will get off) and try to use stick without it. It will hurt your thumb but you should notice that stick works even better now.

After rubber removing (some if it) I could close the gp2x's case much tighter than it was before. For a fact using screws isn't necessary now as the unit closes itself nicely.

I was expecting some problems with overheating assuming this rubber was needed to cool the MMSP2 chipset (heating the lcd panel!!? but it's the GPH so who know :rolleyes: ) but get none of them. Even at 266MHz all was fine so I can say it doesn't affect cooling (at least not much).

 

[Pie Man]

allready benn done

 

[dreamwarbird]

cheers for sharing ur experiences!!

 

[Paradox]

interesting to know it improves the stick

 

[cakey]

I'm guessing that rubbery layer may have been put there to protect the LCD.

 

[subin]

what you described with pressure on the screen and such sounded similar to advice gbax gave me in their email saying they had shipped my gp2x. i'll copy and paste so you get their exact words: "On some units the case can be too tightly sealed, just loosen the screws slightly, signs of this are screen ghosting when using the joypad."

in fact having read over this again i'm not sure how well it relates to what you meant. but oh well.

 

[stinch]

Mine defiantly has heat transfer pads not rubber pads. The fact they used the screen as the heat sink and that it runs from 2 AA's suggests it isn't going to need a lot of cooling.

 

[bazuka]

Hmm... I opened mine up to see if it would do any goodness to my stick. To my surprise, I found I don't have any at all. My serial # is 2005.12.10-GP2XV127-00001016.

 

[Cbass182]

On my first GP2X I had to rubbery heat transfer pads that touched the screen and distorted the screen a little when moving the joystick. I also had a dead pixel and some other issues with it. When I sent it back in and got my replacement, I popped the bugger open and to my surprise, there aren't any pads there anymore. There are a few other minor differences from this one and my old one.

This is a list of everything i noticed.

1. LED's have a white hue over them so you can't see the actual led
2. no "heat transfer pads" on the inside pressing against the screen.
3. Joystick not quite as stiff
4. When I open the case there is a post from the back of the case pushing against the back of the PC board where the joystick is.
5. My abxy buttons seem to push softer for some reason. (could just be nothing)
6. When soldering the headphone jack it looks like they actually heated the area where soldering so the solder actually flowed instead of balling up, but on the joystick there are a couple pins where the solder is balled up. So not much of a difference.

Joystick post


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