About a dozen or so solder reflows between 3 or 4 PS3s. I've been able to resurrect the console every time, but the duration of the "repair" varies greatly, depending upon how much damage was done to the mobo before it finally gave up the ghost.
You can almost keep doing the reflows indefinitely, but the console becomes pretty unreliable to the point of being inconvenient.
Eventually I ended up just having the three consoles that I wanted operating without having to worry about it dying during use refurbished by SCE. I've only had one of the refurb units die on me, so they're about as reliable as the average new console.
But given that the cost of refurbs is really not that much less than the price of a new console (a $199 model), we've hit a point where it is now better to simply recycle/discard broken PS3s and replace them with new ones, as wasteful as that may be.
