earlyer this month my got PS3 Ylod for the second time. this one was the refurbished 60gb model that sony sent me after i sent in my luanch ps3 in may. unfortunatly i got the ylod after the 90 day warrenty on the replacment model expired. Instead of paying another 150 for another 60gb with a new firmware timebomb on it I tried fixing it myself using the youtube guide to reflowing the ps3 main board.

And i have successful revived my ps3 and just in time as i got borderlands in from game fly.

now that is some neat work.
Congrats. And hope that your PS3 will stay healthy for the long period of time~~~~~

i hope so to. the first time i tried to fix it it worked for 4 min the ylod again. this time i used a bit more thermal paste (keeps chips from over heating) and put flux (some liquid chemical that helps the solder on main chips) on the Cell and RSX chips before doing a second reflow.

May only be a temporary fix.

At the very least, I'm assuming you used a better TIM like AS5 than the factory paste, which should drop load temps by a few degrees at minimum.

If my refurb 60GB unit dies, I'm not sending it back to SCE for repair again, so I'd either reflow the logic board myself or just recycle it for parts.

Fortunately, it currently sees about as much use as my Xbox 360, which is to say very little, since the 40GB replacement w/ 500GB HDD I bought a year ago has become my main console. And as use drops to zero, the odds of failure coincidentally also drops to zero.

I've pretty much stopped playing any PS2 games anyway and would just as soon wait for re-releases tweaked for the PS3 (like GoW collection, and hopefully ICO collection and MGS collection).

More TIM doesn't = better cooling. If anything, too much will cause excess material to squeeze out between the chip and heatsink. You'll see this sometimes with factory jobs in cheaper consumer electronics.

If using a metal particle based TIM, that can actually lead to a short circuit in worst case scenarios if it overflows onto the chip connectors or logicboard. 

High quality TIM like Arctic Silver 5 is actually applied by using LESS material than regular pastes, which are correctly applied by using a plastic card to evenly smooth a thin layer of material over the chip surface.

With AS5, you would only use a rice grain sized drop.

my launch PS3 didn't YLOD, but it freezed up all 30-60 minutes with graphical artifacts and stuff (pretty scary - I guess it was close to a YLOD as well)

yesterday I opened it and changed the thermal compound (the original thermal compound was in a horrible state) and now it works great again, without freezes (tested it for ~8hours)

@ greenmedic88 )

why are people still recommending the Arctic Silver 5 paste, although there are the superior Arctic Cooling MX-2 (this one is even cheaper than the silver 5)and MX-3 pastes ?

Good Job man..

Yea i used artic silver 5. when opening it up originally the sony used some really cheap paste and Alot of it. I just used enough to have a thin sheet over the chips. I dont play my ps2 game on ps3 anymore either as i still got my ps2.