A week ago my PS3 started locking up, crashing games and generally being unstable. It eventually reached a point where the system was unusable so I decided to take it apart and see what I could do to fix it. It turns out that the the PS3 uses cheap silicon thermal compound and has a cheap heat sink with a minimal amount of copper but alot of aluminum. Having spent $500.00 on this thing when I bought it I would think Sony could have dispersed heat a little better by placing a full copper heatsink in the system. As it would turn out, the silicon evaporated off of the cell processor leaving my system begging for mercy. I applied silver thermal compound for better conduction and it now works great! My model is the generation 2 80gb listed here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3

Let’s take a look inside:

The PS3 has about four million screws ( just kidding)  Actually it was really easy to take apart once the initial case cover was removed. On the bottom there is a little plastic piece where the warranty sticker is, you pop that off and remove the warranty stick and unscrew it and viola, you slide off the cover and can get to all of the screws that hold the case together. This is a picture of the major components.

This is the motherboard metal enclosure with the heatsink still attached, notice that it is made of aluminum :( In the middle you will see copper leads to the heatsink.

The cooling fan is pretty big and seems sufficient. The design for cooling is good, it is just the parts that are cheap.

Here is the bottom of the heatsink with the copper leads. I had already wiped one side off but notice that the right side has the thermal compound running off to the edges, this signifies two things – one that they applied too much thermal compound, two that the cooling was not sufficient to prevent evaporation and runoff.

This is the heart and soul of the system, the Cell processor. This was the component that caused my system to crash due to overheats. I applied silver compound directly to it and runs much cooler now.

The blue ray drive is shown here – lately this has been flaky and I may need to replace it soon. As you can see there is nothing fancy about it.

The PSU ( Power Supply Unit) This component appears to be very well built. It is also well grounded into the chassis.

Several of the screws and the hard drive inside. The drive is simply a laptop sata drive easily purchased from the store and very easily upgraded.

In summary:

I love my PS3, but opening it up makes me sad! I must say the system has been pretty reliable and after 2+ years of constant operation has given me little trouble – but Sony really should explain that routine maintenance is needed on these systems as with any PC or Computer type system. I hope you enjoyed this – Dustin