Hardware Motherboard Replacement?

[mansonss]

Evening (or morning) fellow 3ds owners! I have been wanting to purchase a gateway (no flaming about brick code etc etc), but as my two 3ds' are on 7.1 firmware, you can see the dilemma. Now, I have searched on Ebay and I don't really want to pay for another complete 3ds. I have come across a motherboard that is supposedly on a 4.x firmware. I have my nice shiny red Pokemon X and Y xl that I was considering putting this in. How hard would this be to accomplish? I know there are a lot of flex cables inside of it that obviously cannot be damaged. So yeah.

tl;dr: How hard would it be to swap motherboards? And would it be worth it to do it to a limited edition 3ds xl?

 

[Cyberdrive]

http://www.ign.com/wikis/nintendo-3ds/3DS_XL_Shell_Swapping

 

[SmileCitrus]

A motherboard swap is not that hard at all since you're only dealing with the bottom half. You just need to remove screws and ribbon cables. It's arguably slightly easier on the XL since you have more space to maneuver in. Honestly, the hardest thing in my opinion is removing the two little rubber things on the underside of the console that hide two screws without damaging them. I'd recommend a sewing needle for that. Other than a screwdriver I'd say that the only tool that's really indispensable is a pair of long, thin, rubber-tipped tweezers to insert the upper LCD flex cable into its socket during reassembly. You can do it with your fingers, but I find it very tough without tweezers.

For what it's worth, I'm a very clumsy person and I've never torn a ribbon cable in a 3DS. I have broken a ZIF connector though so watch out for those, especially the ones for the lower screen backlight and touchscreen, since they're tiny.

 

[slingblade1170]

Extremely easy to do, just gotta have the tri screw driver that Nintendo products use.

 

[rip-it-up]

A motherboard swap is not that hard at all since you're only dealing with the bottom half. You just need to remove screws and ribbon cables. It's arguably slightly easier on the XL since you have more space to maneuver in. Honestly, the hardest thing in my opinion is removing the two little rubber things on the underside of the console that hide two screws without damaging them. I'd recommend a sewing needle for that. Other than a screwdriver I'd say that the only tool that's really indispensable is a pair of long, thin, rubber-tipped tweezers to insert the upper LCD flex cable into its socket during reassembly. You can do it with your fingers, but I find it very tough without tweezers.

For what it's worth, I'm a very clumsy person and I've never torn a ribbon cable in a 3DS. I have broken a ZIF connector though so watch out for those, especially the ones for the lower screen backlight and touchscreen, since they're tiny.

Spot on answer

 

[Dan-the-Rebirth]

i swaped the mainboard in my Zelda XL its a fairly easy process, some say the uper screen conector is tricky, but i opend the DS half and placed it on the side so that it stands upright. and uses a tweezer hold the conector while i holded the mainboard in my other hand