Okay, so I recently got a YLOD and decided to fix it myself.

What is the problem exactly? In most cases it's overheating (in fact, I think YLOD might always be overheating. I believe that other issues are indicated by a blinking red light and beeps).

This is, in most cases, dust building up in your system over time. When I opened my system it was just full of dust. It had dust on the motherboard, dust in the adapters, dust all over the BDVD drive, and of course, tons of nasty dense black dust in the heatsinks and fan.

What you have to do to fix this is open your PS3. I'm not going to post a walkthrough as that's unnecessary (and I already did it, too late to take more pics, didn't think I'd be making a post about it here) because there's plenty of them on the internet and you can find them easily on Google. I just wanted to raise awareness that you are not screwed if your console gives you a YLOD. It's just dusted up.

Before opening though, I recommend you have all the right tools

> A large phillips screwdriver
> A medium-small phillips screwdriver
> Something to pry at troublesome parts might be helpful (I used a very large "non-phillips" screwdriver).
> A magnetic-tipped screwdriver might help for various parts, but be careful not to get it too close to the electronic parts. If it's low-powered like mine then it probably can't really do any damage anyway, but I'm damn careful anyway.
> Thermal compound - replacing the old compounds with a new high-end compound will help A LOT. The thermal compound on mine was crusting and mostly gone when I opened it. If your PS3 is more than 4 or 5 years old I'd say it's due for a thermal compound replacement.
> Patience, and be observant, remember where things go.

Pics :




The fan - one huge fan.






The naked motherboard

Thermal compound? You mean the gel below the heatsink?

Yes. That's thermal compound. I replaced it with Arctic Silver 5, that and getting rid of the dust fixed the issue.

Good job cleaning that up, i do things like this on a daily basis for a lot of people with computers or consoles (replacing thermal compound and cleaning dust).
Keep up the good work.

Nice you'll probably also want a can of compressed are to help clean dust out of vents and fans

(06-24-2012 08:47 PM)Alexander Moore Wrote:  Yes. That's thermal compound.

Oh they must say that more in the states then I've only ever heard it called thermal gel/paste.

Thought this compound may have been some metallic object or something.

Me at least If I try it (Even if I follow the instructions)

since i don't own a PS3 the only 2 things that attracted me was :

1 - nice house lol

2- what camera did you use the pic looks amazing !!!!

It surely was a Nikon...

Only one thing piqued my interest:

THE LAPTOP!!!