Reply 460 of 613, by Sir Isaac
wrote:Also be sure to check the seating of all cards in the backplane. I'm not entirely sure why, but sometimes I'll have POST errors until I fidget with the Xi 8088 card a few times and then it'll work fine for several days or even weeks. I used some eBay card connectors on my backplane -- maybe they weren't the best quality.
For checking solder bridges, I'm a fan of using a stereo microscope. AmScope has some pretty affordable ones. That big SMD chip on the VGA card in particular took me multiple passes of retouching it, picking at the pins to make sure they were soldered down good, cleaning up bridges, etc.
I've found I had to reseat the cards a few times. I assumed it was because I don't have them properly mounted in a case. I'll have to look in to that further.
I too use an AmScope stereo microscope, I went to the extreme of getting a proper usb 3.0 camera for it. I find it absolutely invaluable for smd work like this.