PS3 slim YLOD RLOD fix

[dvd4me]

Hello,
This is about fixing the PS3 slim red light of death, yellow light of death or any other light combinations while booting.

I found this slim PS3 CECHK04 model in recycling, it was turning on with a high speed fan and red light blinking. It was opened and missing the cover screws.
Never had a PS3 fat before so I had little info about the most common failure modes. It seems this red light blinking was a very common issue.
I start reading about the trend of re-flow the chips, this made me more curious, now I know they were practically killing these machines by reflowing the chips, CPU and GPU.
It seams that the heat treatment was reviving the TOKIN capacitors enough that the result of the re-flow was an almost " back to normal" PS3.

Which it was, curiously, proven after that it does not last very long, because other complex reasons like PCB delamination issues and other scenarios.

I believed initially the high rpm fan issue in this PS3 was caused by bad heat transfer, the dried thermal paste well known issue.
Not realizing this is not the cause, I tried to fix-it, I de-lid the CPU and the GPU to replace the thermal paste. There are some decent guides out there for that.

Obviously this has done nothing, still high rpm. Then I did the hair dryer " fix", warming up the CPU/GPU to a decent temperature.

You have to understand that any hair dryer will not be able to re-flow the CPU and GPU and solve any issues. I was just curious to see the effect on my PS3.

In my case, heating up the TOKIN's capacitors just made the fan go quiet! That means the CPU just booted up and realized there was no overheat after all.
Further testing, when it was about to show an image thru the HDMI port, the red light starts to blink. That means the GPU is not going anywhere.

This is the point I started to search deeper and I found this TOKIN capacitors issue, I tried changing them with regular electrolytic caps and it worked! The PS3 booted.

After that, all it was just a question of soldering skills and all is good now.

Here is the video of the fixing and PS3 booting up:



The picture below is the new arrangement of the replaced TOKIN capacitors.

[dvd4me]

Hello again,

This is the second part where the Blue ray drive is put back together after it was harshly opened by the previous owner to extract the disk stuck inside.
Since the PS3 was still running nice after the caps were changed I wanted to be able to insert the game discs.
Temperatures after delid and liquid metal compound were very good and the fan was quiet.
Video of the Blue ray drive is here:



Cheers