PS3 YLOD Woes

Yesterday my trusty fat PS3 decided to have a stroke. It simply shut itself down without warning and entered Yellow Light of Death (YLOD) mode, where cycling the PS3 on starts it up, flashes the power LED yellow once after a couple of seconds, then starts blinking it red and refuses to continue, no matter how many times you retry.

The problem seems to be caused by the soldering under the CPU and GPU chips cracking, after thousands of heat/cool cycles during the life of the PS3 (mine is close to four years old). Fortunately, there is a fix for it, which requires disassembling the device completely and applying heat to the GPU and CPU areas, in an effort to reflux the soldering under the chips.

After some research I found this video by youtube user djwhetzel that does an excellent job walking through the disassembling, fixing, and reassembly of the PS3.

PS3 motherboard.

After following the steps in the three-part video I was able to get the PS3 working again. The fix is not exactly difficult. Breaking apart and getting the PS3 back together was a fairly straight-forward process, especially with the video's guidance. It's mostly a matter of having proper sized screw drivers (I used four different-sized phillips heads and a torx) and cleaning and reapplying thermal compound on the main chips.

Applying heat was a bit unnerving because of the potential for permanent damage. I actually went through this step twice, after I wasn't very convinced I had applied enough heat the first go round. I used a shop heat gun with 570/1100 F heat settings to complete this step.

The good news is that the PS3 came back online like a champ. The bad news is that this fix is usually not permanent and seems to last only for two or three months. Now that I've done it once I could probably repeat the process from top to bottom in less than an hour, but the sad truth is that my beloved PS3 is on its way out... At least I got a chance to back up all my data until I have to buy a new one, but I really like the old fat models: it looks better (IMHO) and has features there are missing in the new slim PS3s (more USB ports, more card readers, and mostly importantly, the ability to play PS2 games).