It took me 4~5 hours because I was placing everything in baggies and grouping it together. I was also being extra careful not to screw anything up, but in the end I did mess up the connector for the blu-ray. It just would not lift up. I also took my sweet time applying the thermal compound. (a very spread out thin layer of MX-2 compound)

Anyway, That stupid pad supplied for the Emotion Engine (EE) isn't large enough in my opinion. It doesn't cover the whole chip. Not only that, it fell apart on me when I tried to peal it off. I put it back together as best as I could, its still formed a square.

Did anyone else feel a performance difference after doing this? I could swear it's a bit faster now, but I'm still paranoid that the fan is at the same sound level as before I took it apart; it just takes a longer to get there (a few extra minutes actually)

My fan would run on high all the time before now it alternates between high and medium, No performance gain as far as I could tell though.

Do you have a lot of pictures stored in you PS3?  I could tell it was faster because it loaded them up quicker. It would take about 2~3 seconds before. Now it only takes 1. It might be that my PS3 was dusty and the old cracked thermal compound was slowing it down from how fast it should be.

Since you don't use the BC you might as well get a slim. Slims use half the energy of launch models.

I'm still playing Valkyrie Profile 2 on it. On and off sort of speak... I also wnat Final Fantasy X and XII and a few other JRPGs that I didn't play since I never owned a PS2.