Sunday 3 March 2013

RLOD (Red Light Of Death) on a PS3

I own a first generation fatty PS3 (upgraded to 120 GB .. waaaaah (at that time lah)) for about 4-5 years now and so far - I have encountered
1) YLOD (Changed the laser and it was fixed)
2) RLOD (happened recently about 1 month ago)

These issues are apparently less prevailent in newer PS3's but since the PS3 super slim hasn't been out that long - I can't guarantee these problems do not occur.  I didn't have the RLOD issue for the past 5 years and only happend recently.


Here were my symptoms - I would play a particular game for a few minutes and about 10 minutes in - the PS3 would automatically shut down and I would get the RLOD (that dreaded blinking red light!)

From my initial investigations - it looked like the PS3 was overheating because I would typically only encounter the RLOD problem when there were a lot of monsters etc on the screen (oh - I would only encounter this problem when playing GOW3).  I figured it should be an overheating problem because the GPU was overheating during graphics intense scenes. 

At this point - I had 2 options :

1. Get a new PS3
2. Get someone to repair my PS3
3. Repair the PS3 myself

Honestly - I wanted to go for Option 2 first - but Play Time in BSC quoted me about RM400+ to repair the problem with NO guarantees that it will not recur! :( :( ... that's a lot of $$ for something that will likely break down again. 

I did consider Option 1 but I figured - why not try repairing it myself first (since there were plenty of websites that showed how to do it - although I knew the likelihood of NOT repairing the issue was pretty high !). 

Note - this is a good site that I followed to understand how to dismantle and reassemble the PS3 and also how to potentially fix the overheating issue : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbb4G4J6Y4M

Off I went to Radioshack in Borders (The Curve) to buy the following items - basically the items you will need to perform this repair yourself :

1. Screwdrivers (Phillips and Torx)


2. Cotton Balls



3. Good quality Thermal Paste (I used Arctic Silver 5)


4. Heat Gun


5. Some thermal paste cleaner solution (Any isopropyl alcohol will do)

This is what everything looked like when put together :P


Ok - let's do a quick recap;

Objective - Fix RLOD so that I can kill some gods in GOW3 using my first generation PS3.  Basically what you are trying to do is replace the existing thermal paste material for your CPU and GPU with a better paste. The original paste is usually of lower quality and not applied properly

Symptom - RLOD (the light below will blink red continuously)



Steps to repairing your PS3 (credits to D3AtHrAiN333 for his step by step instruction which I used to follow)


1. Disassemble your PS3



Below are a series of PICs that I took when I was diassembling my PS3 (SWEAT!)

















Before



After





 


2. Applying the Thermal compound








3. Reassemble your PS3 (sorry this is the part where I got really lazy taking pictures!)



 ...... about 2 hours later :P .. everything was reassembled with the uber paste applied ... anddddd ... everything started up fine with no issues.  HOWEVER - although GOW3 still gave me RLOD - I did manage to play an additional about 5 more minutes before getting it :( :( ...

I would love to say that everything worked fine after that but unfortunately for the game that I wanted to play it was still not enough.

The next day I decided not to waste any more time trying to repair it (I might still try some other techniques later) and got myself this ...



Paid about RM 900 for the 500 GB version; is super slim (actually to me it's still quite fat) and doesn't overheat when I play GOW3! 

Did I regret spending about RM200+ in materials to try and repair my original PS3?  Nope ... at least I tried knowing very well that it is not a problem that can be easily permanently fixed (I just wanted it to work long enough for GOW3 :P) and now ... I have um .. 2 bluray players!  :) :) .. I can always use the other PS3 in another room in the future!






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