How not to repair a Playstation 4 - The Risks of Second Hand Electronics

I have enough game consoles in the house, they're not all current generation. I have a Wii, Wii-U, XBox 360, Nintendo (3)DS, GBA, Gameboy, SteamLink to my gaming PC, and access to a Playstation 3. A friend of mine offered me a copy of Destiny since I've been playing Destiny 2 on the PC and I haven't finished the first.

The problem? It's a console exclusive, so I thought to myself "What if I managed to get a Playstation 4? I can play Destiny 1 free online with it and... maybe if it's a bit damaged, I can fix it!"

So most 'damaged' Playstation 4s go for about £60-90, claiming that it's an easy fix for the HDMI port, apparently these get very loose and rip up the pads on the PCB and just need a re-soldering job. Sounds easy enough, or perhaps the processor needs to sit under a heat gun for a bit of reflow.

So I gave myself a budget, can I get hold of and fix a Playstation 4 for £50 max? I thought I was in with a winner when I found one on gumtree for £25 saying it 'doesn't display but it obviously powers up'.

Yeah, yeah... sooooo I really should have checked it physically before handing over the money, when I got the Playstation 4 home, the torx screws had been mangled. so I opened it up. Oh boy.

Oh, boy.

I really wish I had taken a photo' of it when I first got to the motherboard, instead, you can bare witness to the clean up after I removed the huge blob of solder that was across the HDMI pins, and the massacre of the board left behind:

Pretty charred for a HDMI port.. so about the rest of it..

I thought maybe they've used some kind of butane / blow torch on this, but it looks like they've drilled through the PCB to get the HDMI port out and then wondered why it's not working.

Still, under advisement, and a bit of clean up, I thought maybe it hadn't been entirely trashed, the vias seem OK and the traces are still there.

I've managed to re-solder the HDMI port on, and now at least any screen I plug in recognises that it's got a HDMI cable plugged in, still though, doesn't work. I'm wondering if this HDMI port is actually connected up properly because it's orientation seems different to the original, may have to double check that later.

So the other part that can fail is apparently the IC under the shielding... time for some proper reflow work and a bit of kapton tape.

This was a pain to remove, I had to go up to 500degC on the station to get this melted. I managed to replace it successfully, still, no go on the visuals. I'm wondering if the filters were also damaged, as those had started to pull the trace from the board a bit.

I've at least learned a lot from soldering at this pitch, which I hadn't done before, and the Playstation 4 does indeed boot up fully, it's just getting the visuals out of the system. At this point I'm just below my budget for fixing it, and I managed to find this graphic online:

Micro soldering isn't something I've tried before either, but at this point, I've literally got nothing to lose from this mess, haha!

What's been your most difficult repair?