PS3 Design Flaws

Well, my PS3 hit the inevitable yellow light of death or YLOD... for which I had to purchase a heat gun to repair my system and get it back up and running. After taking apart the PS3 I realized that the cooling system in the PS3 is massive and so far looks to be an efficient cooling system. It works really well. I discovered in turn however that they have made a couple of massive mistakes. One the entire motherboard is encased in steel. This is both good and bad. The good aspect of it is the fact that it keeps the board from flexing and bad in the fact that steel is a very good conductor of heat. Now the kicker is just like the Microsoft Xbox X-clamp system it has the graphical and central processors on one side of the motherboard (the bottom side) and a flex pressure steel plate on the other side that screw into the heat sink on the bottom to secure a pressure connection between the processors and the heat sink. Anyone who knows anything know that this setup is bound for destruction and with good cause... it is an engineered design flaw with purpose which I will not go into here.

With metal on both sides of the processor, it actually causes the processor to get really hot and the solder joints to the processor to get hot and can float the solder to the processor causing a bad connection. The easiest trick to fix this is with a heat gun like the one I purchased you will want to make sure it has a low (750 degree) setting to heat up the connections and re-float the solder to secure the connections again and get the system working.

I am not a big fan of the ribbon cables in the system because of how easy these cables are damaged and/or the contacts corrode but it is understandable why they used these super thin ribbon cables due to space constraints.

Repairing the system is easy and there are many videos on youtube to show you how to do it if you don't know already or you can let someone who knows how to fix it for you. I make and will have a HOW TO on the main site under the HOW TO section in which you can see what all you need to do to fix your own system if you wish to try and what you must do to fix it.

Keep in mind a heat gun will run you anywhere from $25 to around $120 depending on what brand and heat gun you buy.

There are many different types of heat sink compounds out there you can use and the best I have ever used and put on these processors is Arctic Silver heat sink compound which will usually cost around $3 to $5 per tube.

Below are the pictures of the unit as I was repairing it and assembling the system again and yes you will see the plates I was talking about and the flaws I pointed out.