PS3 60GB [CECHA01] -- Overheating and Diagnosis requested.

Bought a problem PS3 from fleaBay and hoping to fix it up.
Ran fine, updated it and restarted it until I stress tested it with The Last of Us (LOL). Lasted a couple minutes on the title screen and had enough. Turned off, red light kept flashing.

From what I gather:
-Thermal paste on CPU and GPU is bad and needs replacing
-Fan may need replacing

I have also heard of a fan controller called E Z Chill. Supposedly, this lets you run the fan faster than allowed but provides results.

What are people's experiences with these solutions and what should I do first? Is it worth it buying a new fan or that regulator?

Thank you for your time.

 

Basically, once you get YLOD on a fat PS3 you have 2 options to fix it:
-reball it (expensive, usually just worth it to get a new one)
-reflow it (cheap, can do it at home yourself, but is at most a band-aid fix that will inevitably fail again)

Reflowing it yourself involves either using a heat gun or possibly slamming it into an oven (yes, it actually works). I'm sure you can find plenty of Youtube videos of both methods.

Thermal paste will not fix the system. It's something that can prevent it from failing again, but changing the paste won't magically turn a YLOD system into a working system again.

As for the fan, it depends. Speeding it up can make it run a little cooler and help prevent YLOD again, you have to fix the YLOD to begin with.

And lastly, lol @ Chad Warden display pic.

 

The thermal paste between the head spreader and die needs replacing on both chips! (Why sony didn't fuse them IDK :/ )

 

It's an old PS3 so the thermal paste will definately need replacing. Stock thermal paste on PS3 and Xbox 360 is cheap brand and only good for 4 years max. I always replace with artic silver mx paste when I refurb consoles. The op mentioned flashing red light but not YLOD, yet. So change of paste should be sufficient. The stock fans are fine to use, just dust them off if they are caked in dust.

For YLOD and RROD, relating to GPU/CPU errors, a proper reflow or reball using a rework station is the only real fix. I have oven baked about 10 motherboards with mixed results but it's not the correct way to do it and will most likely kill your board. Like mentioned, it'll be cheaper to buy another console, maybe a slim which runs cooler.

 

On fat PS3s in the past what I've done is installed a potentiometer between the 3.3V line on the PSU and the PWM line on the fan and then you can manually crank the fan up so it runs faster. Puncture a hole in the casing somewhere so you glue the knob so you can control it. Again, you can find guides on how to do this online. Google "ps3 fan potentiometer".

 

The bad thing about increasing the fan speed is that it's loud as hell. But it will work better.

 

i do 3 things with my Slim PS3's ...............

-increase than internal fan speed to 70%
-my own external fan mod
-replace the Thermal Paste with Arctic Silver 5


the result is they run at around 40 degrees Celsius , if i dont use the external fan it runs around 50. With no modding the PS3's are hot as hell to touch underneath but after the mod's its just slightly warm.


from start to finish the external mod takes around 2 hours to do

 

70% speed, It sounds crazy, really. It must be damn loud and annoying to hear for hours. Glad that someone made all he could to make the coolest PS3 system, but whats the point in 40 degrees? My friend made almost the same thing with FAT model. He cut out part of the bottom to install two tower-like PC coolers. 33 degrees. But it looks ugly and can be placed only vertical.

 

You will get with any ps3 version soon or later a ylod, overheat and so...
And it doesn't depends on the temp. You can get it with 30 or 60 degrees.

Only solution, buy a decr 1400a (tool) they have a complete different hardware setup. And they ylod safe.