Chosen Solution
So, I have a PS3 which recently YLODed and did a reflow on it. Obviously, I cleaned it up and applied Arctic Silver 5. That seemed to fix the issue, the PS3 is now able to boot up without problem but it seems to be overheating especially when playing demanding games. The first time it turned off immediately after the RDR loading screen but it should not be hot by that time and on the touch it wasn’t. After that I turned it back on and was able to play for 2 hours straight without an issue. When playing less demanding games it has never turned off by itself. I am wondering what is my best bet for fixing this issue. Was the reflow not done properly? Is it worth jailbreaking it just to speed up the fans? Will it make any difference? Should I try changing thermal paste under the heatspreaders of CPU/RSX? Thanks in advance.
@feanorn you can try and get the fan to run faster and you can most certainly try more thermal paste. You did not tell us how you did the reflow. The proper fix for this would most likely be a professional reball with a new IC (unlikely you can find one. Anyhow, the biggest reason for failure to reflow is not enough consistent heat. There is a fine line between reflowing and absolutely melting the solder, so one needs to be aggressive without going over board. If nothing else, get a couple of temperature probes and see what heat you generate. You also need to make sure that you apply the thermal paste properly etc. Follow the guide from here and keep on trying. Second remember that there can be multiple causes for the YLOD: Dead/Disconnected BluRay Drive Cold-Joint between the CPU/RSX/EE(If your console has one) Failing Power Supply Overheating Corrupted NAND Flash, and multiple others. The use of this may work for a short time but the real reason for this is the design of the IC. It is a Flip Chip design which has shown multiple failures for the PS3 as well as Xbox360 which uses the same design for their IC. Here is a very “quick and dirty” explanation of what causes most of the YLOD/RROD. It is not always a failure of the solder balls which connect the Flip Chip BGA package to the motherboard. It does happen and you can see why [ http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=223|on here] More commonly however is that the failure is due to the chip design itself.
As you can see the “bumps” are what actually connects the die to the substrate to make the chip complete. If these bumps fail, the die does no longer make contact with the substrate and thus no contact with the circuit board. The chip has failed.
