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greenmedic88 on 27 June 2011
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LOVEoo said:
greenmedic88 said:
LOVEoo said:
Well, I didn't buy it at launch but I bought it off my friend and he did. It's beat up and its loud as fuck...but it works.

Sounds like it may not be working for much longer. Fans running at high speed typically means the chipset is overheating and the fans are trying to compensate.

If you were to disassemble the console and remove the heatsink, you would probably find that the factory TIM has completely dried up. And you'd probably also find a lot of dust bunnies/debris clogging up the HSF and inside the casing if it's never been cleaned out properly in the last 4-5 years. 

That's exactly what my original PS3 started doing in the months just prior to when it gave me the YLoD. 

Any simple way for me to clean it? I'm thinking of just trading this for a 360 and buying a new ps3+ps2 if this shit keeps up.

The simplest way would be to use a shop vacuum or any sort of vacuum with a hose attachment for vacuuming corners/small spaces to vaccum out all the vents, particularly the rear vents which are the "exhaust ports" for the HSF. You can see the cooling element behind the vents. 

To give the console a thorough cleaning, you will have to disassemble the case by removing the cover and unscrewing the top panel (go online for instructions) which will give access to the internals of the PS3. In order to access the HSF, which is at the bottom of the casing, you have to pull all the internals out of the console (the whole assembly can be removed as one piece) at which point you'll be able to see just how much crud has actually accumulated on the fans and in the heatsink over the years. 

Replacing the TIM between the heatsinks and the CPU and GPU is a little bit more fiddly for anyone who hasn't ever assembled a PC or installed a CPU, but it is still a pretty simple task. Most will take the opportunity to apply better TIM than the factory paste, which in older consoles, has a high chance of being dried out. Everyone who's ever installed a CPU or built a PC has their opinions about "the best" TIM, so feel free to read about the sea of info about them and all the lab tests, but just about any quality TIM is better than factory and Arctic Silver 5 (AS5), which is relatively easy to find locally due to being the default "best" TIM from a few years ago, is fine.