Gassing Off - Motherboards that Smell?

dmauer asks: "I recently purchased what ought to have been my Dream Machine. An uber-fast dual Athlon with oodles of speedy RAM, a Geforce4, and a hard drive big enough to choke a horse (all in a snazzy aluminum case, even). So I get the thing home, set it up, and proceed to install Debian, making sure all my hardware is working nicely, etc., etc., and then I realize that there's a problem I hadn't anticipated. It smells." Usually when consumer electronics have a distinctive smell, something is wrong. Has anyone else run into such a problem, before? Assuming this isn't a electronic or health problem, what can one do to eliminate the odor from the immediate area without resorting to periodic fumigations?

Comments

Re:smells like what?

[Perdo]

Turn your oven to 100 degrees F, use a thermometer to insure that is actually 100 degrees F. Prepare a cookie sheet with a half inch layer of baking soda and a half inch layer of sand on top of the soda. Place the offending circuit board component side down on the sand bed. Insure that there are no insulated wires in with it (remove the northbridge cooler). Cook for 24 hours. Raise temp to 140 for another 48 hours.

The board did not get cooked long enough at the fab to get all the flux out of the soldier. It will not last long without a good cooking. The soldier will be very prone to cracking until the board is properly cooked.

DO NOT try to accelerate the process by using higher heat. The plastic components will melt. this is normally done before the capacitors are mounted so be SURE not to exceed 140 F.

Let it cool at 100 F for 4 hours then cool overnight with oven powered off still on it's sandbed until the thermometer is reading same as ambient air temprature.

Clean Oven before and after. Use the vent fan the entire time the process is running. Failure rate should be 5-15%. Boot the board clean (no components, CPU, memory) listen for no CPU beep code, add processor, listen for no memory beep code, add memory, listen for no video beep code, and video card etc...

The sand bed is hazardous waste. Flux, while a paste at room temperature, is an acid when heated.