Which models of PS2 are the quitest/loudest in terms of fan noise? I recently acquired a fat ps2 scph 35003 (it has a firewire port) and was surprised by the fan noise just by having the console on. It sounds like a low powered hair drier. In contrast my scph 50003a is virtually silent when on. My scph 77003 CB slim is quiet until about half an hour when the annoying higher pitch small fan comes on (I actually returned my first one thinking it faulty because the fan sounds almost like an electronic buzzer). Anyway, I'm probably overly sensitive to noise, but when I can hear it over the TV speakers it gets on my nerves. I'm really surprised Sony would have allowed them to make such a racket, especially as in Japan people have less room to position their consoles.
Yeh, the early ones are markedly louder than the later models. The 5XXX series was marketed as much quieter with DVD-R support and its even mentioned this on the outer box. I always found the 7XXX and 9XXX were super quiet. My launch 1XXX series is very loud in comparison.. Luckily my appreciation for it overcomes the racket... It was quite a hot topic when they launched, along with the lack of anti-aliasing debacle.
I own a 35K series ps2 before but I think the fan isn't as loud as you describe. It is not as quiet as the slim ps2 but still far from a low power drier Is there something wrong with your fan? Try to lubricate it with WD40 and clean off the dust / animal hair etc.
Fan speed can be programmed on the EEPROM, along with tray eject speed (all models). Additionally, on models with expansion bay the fan has two operational speeds: Without harddrive attached(or with the harddrive deactivated) and with the harddrive active. So it kind of "varies" based on what you're doing with the PS2 and if you are using a internal harddrive.
That's interesting. Is there an easy way to reprogram and turn down fan speed and will this damage the console? I will try cleaning the 35003 model and see if it changes anything. Even without hard drive it is much louder than my 50003 (which is barely audible just by being on). Yeah, before my network adapter broke and I had it connected there was definitely an increase in sound like you say. I'm probably more sensitive to noise than the average person, especially as I don't like turning the TV up very loud.
There is nothing interesting you can do with firewire port. Why would you use 35 model? 50 got new EE/GS revision on smaller process technology I think.
Oh, a long story. Basically because I got the SCPH-35003 for free and noticed that it had a firewire port. I had the idea of using the port for connecting to hard drive for opl since I couldn't get a network adapter and hard drive to work properly on my SCPH-50003a. I was finding it really hard trying to find a working large size IDE 3.5 drive for cheap. On this http://ps2drives.x-pec.com/?p=list hard drive compatibility list it says that this seagate ST3320620A hard drive should work. My model number is ST3320620AV. Not on the list, but it looks to be the same and was working for a while, spinning up properly and playing games, until I switched it off and it 'forgot' the formatting and all the games on it. I had no way to connect it to a PC (I'm ordering an external 3.5 USB ide enclosure today) so was 48bit formatting using ulaunch, installing via hdlgameinstaller and playing via OPL, which did actually work. But basically, as I said, the drive seems to forget it is formatted and I have to start from scratch each time formatting again so maybe that drive isn't compatible after all? When I was using hdloader it just froze on the start screen saying I needed to format the drive. I tried every version of hdloader I could find and tried to patch it myself for 48bit but all of them had the same problem as before. Then my network adapter seemed to fail as I couldn't transfer games onto the hard drive using hdlgameinstaller either (the light on the network adapter stopped coming on and I got 'network startup error 203' in OPL even though my net config works for a slim PS2 via SMB shared folder on PC). So I had to wait until recently, when I could get a new (second hand) network adapter to start again. Hopefully when my enclosure comes I can look at the hard drive in Winhiip and see if it works that way. If it doesn't then I know it is the hard drive that is at fault and I will recommence my search for a hard drive. It sounds like a lot of fuss when I can already play games via slim PS2 network shared folder, but I hate leaving the PC on wasting energy (I'm also looking into Sambadroid to see if I can network share games via android tablet too) and want it to be all self-contained usb hard drive goodness like a softmodded wii
OPL does not support i.Link. PS2ESDL once has i.Link support, but I had long discontinued it due to a lack of interest by the userbase and because I cannot maintain it (I'm not trained to work with IEEE1394). Error codes 2xx indicate a hardware issue, as the adaptor cannot be detected properly. Do not bother with tinkering with the fan speed. The SONY engineers made it that way for a reason; these older consoles are less efficient than the newer ones, hence heating up quite a bit more (Refer to the wattage). Also because some of these older fans were simply just not as quiet as the ones used in the SCPH-50000 series. If noise really bothers you, then these older consoles are just not for you. Finally, SMB support of OPL will never be on the same level as gaming from the HDD unit. If your hardware wasn't giving problems, it should have also been easier to work with, compared to SMB support (No need to worry about permissions, addresses nor file naming).
50k is horrible. Cost reduction is the only reason that piece of garbage exists. The only thing good about 50k is the built in IR sensor and because of that IR sensor you can turn it on/off using the remote controller.
Are there any visible downgrades on this model? I do not think so. Actually from 50k they are sending digital signal to encoder chip afaik. Slim models are even more garbage by cost reduction metric.
Cheaper plastic, extremely fragile project on all moving parts (particularly the disc tray), optical pick-up sabotage (these models along with the first few PS2 SLIMs do fry lasers more often than anything else on the PS2 product line) to mention a few *good* reasons to stay away from SCPH-5000x. The worst slim models are built practically with the same chips as the 5000x series. One of the slim series use EE+GS chips (which were originally designed for the PSX DVR product which was a horrible fail. So they had to use these EE+GS chips somehow. That would be one of the reasons for the PS2 SLIM release. Also HD Loader.
This may be somewhat true, but I do not use DVD-ROM on fat PS2. Though I appreciate less noise. EE+GS and slims were designed for cost reductions above all. HD Loader reasoning is superficial.
You can say anything you want. EE+GS was originally developed for the PSX (DESR series) product. That's a public known fact. And about HD loader reasoning being superficial, I don't think there is anything superficial about it: It caused SONY to stop developing PSBBN and completely halt production of FAT consoles. Also it stopped the plans of releasing the PSBBN service worldwide.
What if it was developed in tandem with the slimline? After all, the PSX appeared around 2004, around the time when the SCPH-70000 was about to be released. It would make more sense to use new hardware, wouldn't it? Also, the SCPH-50000 series (v1.70) boot ROM already had the flash storage driver included, even though no PlayStation 2 console had an expansion device that supports the flash storage. What if it made more sense, to say that the SCPH-70000 was based on the PSX instead? After all, starting with the SCPH-50000 series, the PlayStation 2 always had code for loading updates from a non-existent flash storage. Other than minor software similarities, the EE+GS combo and integrated SPEED device exists. But they failed to release the network adaptor and HDD in most regions. By 2005 or so, it would have been so long (5 years) without the HDD unit appearing in most parts of the world. They're also known to cut out parts that see little to no use at all. So it's not totally possible to be certain that they did all that, just to kill HDLoader. If they wanted to, they could have changed the SSBUSC revision again and heavily protect the new driver with MagicGate and DNAS, just to kill HDLoader.
PSX is actually from late 2003. It would be safe to say that the 5000x was developed in tandem with the PSX instead. It's amusing how many parts on the PSX are actually similar to the SCPH-50000 series. That would also explain the flash storage function, which is only used on the PSX, as storage for the OSD boot files. It really feels like the PS2 Slim was just a quick rework of the 5000x hardware.
It was first to use it. Slim model came less than a year after it. Major redesign for a less than a year? I do not think so. afaik HDLoader came out mid 2004. Slims were already in final phases of design. And HD Loader was never as popular as modchips anyway.
