The complete guide to reflowing By Nichibotsu BY ATTEMPTING THIS REPAIRING METHOD YOU MAY DAMAGE YOUR HARDWARE, I TAKE NO RESPONIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MAY DO TO YOUR CONSOLE BY FOLLOWING THIS GUIDE. This is meant to be a complete guide on how to do a good reflow, and how to avoid YLOD coming back. YLOD is the most common heat-related failure, and it s caused by the solder cracking after repeated heating to high temperatures. It should be noted that YLOD is a somewhat misleading term, depending on model and specific solder points that break, the YLOD does not always present the same simptoms. It sometimes shows up as what is called GLOD, where the failure is localized on the GPU chip. Please be aware that this is a DIY method, it does not give 100% chances to get your ps3 back to work, and it may even damage it worse if not done properly, so if you don t want to take risks, take it to some shop and have them make a Reballing on your system, that will fix your problem and is done professionally, but it will cost you some money. So, let s start with what you will need First of all, a heat gun with adjustable heat, which will be set to 350 c, and if you can control fan speed turn it to low Thermal compound, silver based one, as artic silver, and some spare cheap one Alcohol to clean the chips s surfaces form old thermal compound
A vacuum cleaner, or a compressed air can like those for pc Aluminium foil Tape Philips screwdriver or fitting xshaped screwdriver A tamper resistant T-10 torx screwdriver for fat consoles, T-8 torx for slim consoles, or either a small flat screwdriver Flux (USE NO-CLEAN FLUX or normal flux will deteriorate the console. The easyest to use is the pen-like solder.) Note Flux is like a heat-activate cleaner...it removes oxidation, allowing solder to flow evenly. The reason it should be used while reflowing is that it makes the solder beads form more uniformly, making for a better repair. I recommend it every time, even for the first reflow. Follow this video before heating: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzrredihte0 but note that NEC chips do not need heating, so you don t need to flux those too. Advanced: for those of you who want to do something a bit harder,or want to have results way better than a normal reflow, or had serious heating problems Butter knife A plastic card that you can cut or any plastic 1mm thin Thermal epoxy glue, Arctic adhesive works fine here Normal caulk-like glue, Permatex Ultra Black RTV does a good replacement I will not cover the opening of the console, i trust the reader to be able to do it : ) If you really need a guide on how to take apart your console, go here http://www.ifixit.com/guide/repair/installing-playstation-3-heat-sink-replacement/3492/1 As for which is GPU and which CPU, on the heatsinks of the chips you can read some writing: the one with RSX REALITY SINTHETIZER on it is GPU, the CELL BROADBAND ENGINE or CELL BE is CPU After you have removed the heatsink, remove the dust from the insides and the fan with air can or vacuum, then clean the surfaces with cloth and alcohol until they are shiny. Now place your console s motherboard on a flat, heat resistant surface,. Create some foots to keep your motherboard flat, you can use some wood, or you can make them out of aluminium foil, which is the easyest thing to do imho This is because when you heat the silicium it will bend if there is nothing sustaining it, and you don t want your motherboard to bend, trust me : )Put sustains under the corners of the motherboard and one between the two chips, which is about at the center of the motherboard.
Pick the aluminium foil and cover the motherboard, holing the foil where the two chips are. The more accurate you are in making the holes, the more you will protect the rest of the motherboard. The foil is not a must, but will help you avoiding useless damage, resulting in a longer lasting console. Light blue dots are where i would put aluminium foots, red areas where to heat Please note that your console may differ from the photo, there are several different models, but allo f them have those two big chips. Use tape on the foil so it does not move while heating, start the heat gun, let it run for 10-20 seconds to reach temperature, then heat the two metallic surfaces, one at time, for 15 to 20 seconds, starting from CPU. Keep heat gun at 3 cm from the chip. Heat in circular motion over the chip, then go to GPU, and heat that one. Now that this side has been done, leave the motherboard to cool before proceeding. Do not move the motherboard while cooling, it may damage it. Let it cool for about ten minutes. After it s cooled remove the foil, turn the motherboard on the other side and put some foil on this side leaving holes where the CPU and GPU are. Remember what said above, making a better protection with aluminium foil protects the rest of the hardware. Use tape, the aluminium foots you made under it and heat the motherboard, always CPU first and GPU later, this time for not more than 15 seconds, but not less than 10. Let everything cool as before. You have now Reflown your console! If you want to go for the Advanced Reflowing prevention, keep reading, elseway apply a thin and even layer of the compound over the chip s heatsinks, then go and put your console back together following the steps to take it apart in reverse order. ADVANCED SECTION Here it comes. First, thermal compound is not only over the heatsinks, but under them too. Also,by doing a reflow, even if you have done it correctly, you might have damaged your chip s thermal sensors, resulting in that YLOD coming back stuff, that everyone has been experiencing around the web. And, due to high temperatures your heatsinks may have warped a little.we will now go trough the methods on how to fix these problems. First, remove the heatsinks from the chips. Before following the next step it s needed to soften the glue holding the RSX heatsink on the chip. Heat to about 85 c the chip, using the heat gun, or better a hair dryer. If you use the heat gun, don not heat it for more than 5 secs and keep the gun at 5 cm, if using hair dryer halve the distance, and heat for 5 secs. Try not to wait too much after the heating or the glue will harden again.
Cut the plastic in a 2 cm x 5 cm piece, and put it between the heatsink and the RSX, in the middle of the heatsink. Do it on the side towards CPU, on the other sides there are small chips preventing you to stick the knife and you may damage them. Now carefully stick the butter knife in between the plastic and the heatsink, be careful to go at least 5 mm deep or the knife will come off while pulling and damage the pcb. Now pull, and the heatsink will come off. If the explaination is not enough, go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=issei4ebaak but be aware, if done wrong it can damage your GPU permanently. So i would suggest trying to get the glue away with a thin blade first, and take away the more you can of it. As for the CPU there is no risk, take a thin blade, and slit it under the heatsink. A razor blade is fine here. Here is a video of how to do it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8wwb0acfvk now that both the heatsinks have been removed,get rid of the old glue from the heatsink and the chips, being careful not do damage anything. Do it with some sandpaper for GPU and with the razor blade on CPU. After removing all the glue, we have to check for an eventual warping of the heated surfaces. You want to do a test fit using cheap thermal compound, the white one, on the GPU...Spread it paper thin on all 5 contact areas, place the heatsink, and pull it straight up. The contact patterns for the memory chips don't have to be perfect, but they should at least have some contact... The contact pattern for the center needs to be just about perfect. The CPU just has one contact pattern... And that should be nearly perfect as well. If it is not perfect, you will have to do some lapping: it s a process of sanding the base smooth by rubbing it back and forth across a piece of low-grit sandpaper that is placed on a flat surface. Once the low-grit has leveled out the heatsink, you switch to 600 grit to remove the scratches from the low grit, and then you use 1000-2000 grit to put a mirror finish on it. Do the same check on the other side, putting cheap compound on the side with the writings, then put it on the disspiator and pull it straight up. If there is not a good contact surface do some lapping there as well, but you will have to do it on the disspator contact surface too. There might be raised edges on one of the heatsinks Use a Dremel Trio to remove those before doing the low-grit sanding.
here you can see some poor contact areas on the dissipators Now that everything is perfectly on contact, put silver thermal compound in the inside of the GPU heatsink, and thermal epoxy over the chips in the corners. Put it back in place, and have epoxy harden. Now for the CPU, put silver thermal cmpound and use Permatex Ultra black or something alike to glue the CPU heatsink. Get some weight and put it over the heatsinks while they dry, anything will do, just not too heavy You may want to do some modification to the northbridge and ram thermal pads as those do not really cool, small heatsinks can be placed in stead of the cooling pads, but you will have to cut the aluminium nut. This will make your system cooler. This isn't to prevent YLOD, but sometimes when the memory overheats you get memory errors that can be very frustrating. The game will slow down to 1FPS and respond very slowly...if you can get to the menu to save, and then reload the save, then problem generally goes away temporarily and then comes back soon after. By cooling the memory properly, you can cut such occurrences significantly. Of course some games just have programming errors or memory leaks. The biggest offender I have found is fallout new Vegas...when you go into areas with lots of people and objects the memory is pushed to capacity, and if there are any problems at all, you drop to 1FPS or less...cooling the memory significantly reduces such problems. After putting everything back together, do not go straight into gaming: start your system, and let it run in XMB, and feel the back for air. Check if you can feel or hear the fan spinning. If you can feel air coming out
of the back, start playing a film or something that usually makes your system s fan spin faster. Feel the air that comes out from the back of the ps3, and if it gets really hot without the fan spinning any faster, turn your system off, as the temperature control is most probably broken. You have some solutions, the easyest ones are either buy one or follow one of KillerBug DIY tutorials to build it. Buy one: http://www.fixmypcdoctor.com/product.php?productid=14&cat=4&page=1ù http://consoletek.biz/en/ps3-e-z-cool/70-ps3z-easy-cool-hidden-control.html http://www.fixmypcdoctor.com/product.php?productid=12&cat=4&page=1 http://consoletek.biz/en/ps3-e-z-cool/69-ps3z-easy-cool-external-control.html Make one: http://killerbug.net/ps3_e-z_chill_ecdiy_assembly.html How to install E-Z chill: http://www.killerbug.net/snf_install_cechh01.html My thanks go to GILKSY, for the video on how to flux and for the first guide i read on reflowing KillerBug, for the great work on fan controlling and help redacting this guide Pereb27 for letting me know i should remove heatsinks from CPU and GPU I hope this helps with the reflowing stuff, good luck everyone : )