Alrighty, after the BC PS3 with incessant overheating that a friend gave me a few months ago, I got my hands on another "defective" fat PS3 for a pittance (a 40GB non-BC model this time). When I got it the drive was shot to heck, the mechanics were dislocated to the point where the unit would not "grab" discs at all. Surprisingly, I managed to fix all this, only to find out that the laser is out of alignment. It still won't read anything. The unit itself, however, works perfectly fine. I use it as a cheap media player, to stream AV off my NAS and watch youtube on my TV. When the 'free games on PSN' thing came around, though, I figured that i might as well activate my PSN account (dormant since the early days of the PSP) and grab WipeOut HD. I updated the firmware, as I had no use for the old "features". I downloaded PS Home and the Rocket Knight demo as well. And guess what? None of them work. They load up, the XMB disappears, screen flashes once and the unit crashes. Happens every damn time. It appears that everything that requires the GPU for 3D drawing crashes the unit completely. Is this a common problem? Is there anything I can do to verify this? Unfortunately I lack a HDMI cable, so I wire it through SCART. I'm a tad bit puzzled as it seems to have no problems whatsoever drawing the XMB!
This was exactly the problem with my 120gb unit that I was trying to repair. DVDs and media files would play all day, and I could leave a PSX game in the console overnight and the demo would run for hours and hours. But PS3 games and Blu-Ray disks would cause the thing to drop frames and eventually crash hard. The RSX chip theoretically has been shaken loose and wants to be reballed. I was able to repair mine temporarily for a few days at a time by reflowing the solder with my hot air SMD rework station, but eventually I took it too far and melted the RSX chip.
Oh my, that does not bode well. I had hoped it was a software problem. Not sure if reflowing is going to be worth it, the drive is still broken and I paid only 30 for the unit. Will think about it, but I'm half considering just being done with it and shelling out for a new Slim.
It was a lot of effort to get the console pulled apart and put back together every time I needed to do a reflow and a heat sink reseat. I don't personally mind, since a lot of my electronics knowledge was out of date and it helped me get caught up on modern ROHS standards. But a reflow is maddening to test properly, because there's no way to know for sure that it worked right until you get everything back together.
The original Playstation 3 systems are junk. The one I've got just green&blue screen after a few minutes. Hopefully you get them working, but I'd just pack it away and buy a slim model.. not sure if the slim has the same bloody problem.
It's known for malfunctions, even if you do look after them. I know a few people who look after their systems, and they're still dead.
They aren't junk if you look after them but they aren't the most hardwearing. My cousins was moved around a few times in a nice big padded bag and ended up beaten to shit. I will attest his fat PS3 GPU seems to be shot, and he looks after his stuff.
