This week has been especially chill for me – which calls for a nice and easy project. How about a rebuild of a PS3 with a dirt-cheap (literally, I couldn’t even buy flower soil for the price I paid) motherboard?
The motherboard is a scrap rescue. It supposedly had a cracked case, missing HDD and PSU, as well as no heatsinks. It comes from a CECHL04, a fairly reliable model, if it was new at the very least. Now, almost 20 years later NEC/TOKIN capacitors can be severely degraded, which usually causes an YLOD. This model, VER-001, has a 65nm/65nm CELL/RSX combo, which are known to be very reliable.
You know me, before I even tested this motherboard it was already delidded. It’s not really shown here, but both dies have a purplish tint. In my experience that means that it ran hot for a prolonged amout of time. It doesn’t really affect performance or reliability, it just looks different than a NOS IC would.
I cleaned both processors and prepared a suitable case. Case itself is from a CECHL, but I think I reused a DIA-001 heatsinks, which have more fins on the RSX side.
Console is more or less back together, in this picture is even turned on already. It’s not fully working, though. PS3 have to have replacement BD drives remarried to the motherboard, but for that I will need to install CFW.
Done and done.
Time for a test.
There is a tiny problem.
Laser doesn’t read any discs.
Obviously, even the easiest project wouldn’t be my project, if it didn’t go wrong at the very end.
I had to bring out another drive, which was already marked as bad and hope that the laser was OK.
Thankfully it’s just a couple of screws, a couple of plastic hooks and a few “Why does this ALWAYS happen to me?”
After laser swap games were read properly. What’s more, I played TLOU for a couple of hours and had no crashes, so NECs are fine, even though this console was used for over 3000 hours, which usually is a point where they fail.
Thanks for reading!