Sony PS3 "Fat" YLOD Repair - Faulty Console Restoration

welcome back guys here i have another pair of ps3 fats they both suffer from the yellow light of death i have a launch model down here this is a backwards compatible unit that can play ps2 games natively pretty scuffed up very well used well loved this was donated to the channel some months ago and a repair has already been attempted but it was unsuccessful here's another ps3 fad this is one revision older than the l01 that i repaired in the last video the one that had the broken hdmi port this one is in h01 and as we can see the warranty seal is intact so no one's been inside this unit and i think it's going to make a good candidate for my first yellow light of death repair attempt so the unit's receiving power when you switch it on you momentarily see a yellow light you hear that triple beep and then you see a flashing red light we'll take a look at this in slow motion green green blue yellow green and then flashing red i don't know why this is called the yellow light of death perhaps to differentiate it from the infamous red ring of death that the xbox 360 suffered from during the same time period so it is a flashing red light but it's known as the yellow light of death in almost every repair video where i've carefully removed a warranty seal like this someone will inevitably leave a comment saying the system is no longer under warranty why don't you just pop a screwdriver in there and open it up and the reason is just preservation these systems are obviously no longer under warranty but when you're not modding the system you're just trying to restore it to its original state the warranty seal is part of that and if you're really anal about the end product i think it's a good idea to try and preserve it takes a few extra minutes and i think it's worth it to complete that final look i have a couple of scratch remover products in mind that i want to try to see if i can minimize the appearance of those scratches on the top cover but not in this video we'll do that in a future project this is just such a beautiful system but that glossy cover is a scratch magnet it's virtually impossible to find one scratch free on the used market and yeah i have never opened up a clean one of these they are always just varying degrees of filthy so it was time for the gloves to come out it's a pretty good indication right there for these somewhat later revision ps3 fats you really should take the power supply out first you'll see a lot of tear down guides that start with the blu-ray drive but um it's just so much easier on these models to take the power supply out first and then unlatch the blu-ray drive ribbon cable nasty nasty we'll definitely blast this guy out later with the compressed air there were some pretty significant hardware changes throughout the life cycle of the ps3 fat and on this model right here there's a daughter board for the wi-fi antenna and the usb ports whereas on the model that we worked on a couple of weeks ago which was newer than this one it was all one big motherboard and i think it's going to be even more interesting when we step further back in time and we look at the launch model ps3 which had a lot more going on with the hardware with the ps2 backward compatibility with the card reader it was just a more complex system here's that daughter board for the usb ports and the wi-fi and almost two years of working on video game consoles i think i can say that i have never stripped a screw until now i'm not sure why the screw gave me a particularly hard time but it was a pin in the butt to get out side note i just noticed this broken plastic piece and by the end of this project i still hadn't figured out where it broke off from i remember the life hack video that i saw where you could use a rubber band or a piece of latex to create some friction between a screwdriver and a stripped screw so that's what you guys see me doing here or at least trying using that glove i was wearing to turn that screw over but it just wasn't moving so next i tried some cutting pliers i really needed something with sharp jaws because there wasn't really much to bite onto in terms of the side of the screw because of its shallow profile but i wasn't getting any grip like this either so took out the three in one oil i decided to dab it in a little bit of oil and just take a half hour break and come back to it it's pretty funny what you get snagged up on sometimes working on projects like this but thankfully this worked i was able to rotate it with the jaws of the cutting pliers and unscrew it the rest of the way out with the screwdriver i'm going to see if i can find the replacement screw in my parts bin i don't really want to reuse this screw when we reassemble the unit another interesting hardware change the battery is not socketed in the h01 although it was socketed in the l01 and speaking of the lzr1 do you guys remember how easily that motherboard popped out and i actually mentioned that sometimes you have to wrestle the board out when you're working on some of these earlier revisions this one wasn't too bad i think the trick is just to apply some pressure and weight don't force it out don't flex the board don't pull it too hard just get your thumbs under there and wait for 10-15 seconds grab it somewhere else wait for 10-15 seconds and eventually it'll release the notorious nec token capacitors this is going to be the focus of our repair today so we'll get to that after the rest of the tear down and that concludes the teardown according to the data sheet for these they're rated at 1200 microfarads up to two and a half volts and there's eight of them in the board four on the cpu circuit and four on the gpu circuit and they're basically connected in pairs of four two on each side so here looking at the rsx there's four capacitors connected in parallel two on the front and two on the back of the board and same thing for the cpu here i'm getting everything ready with the hot air station i'm setting it to 450 celsius fan speed 7. i'm going to cover all the nearby components with kapton tape there's a lot of sensitive components here and you could easily knock something out or inadvertently remove something from the board so gonna try and minimize that risk as much as possible and there's the sound of my new fume extractor yay we're not going to be breathing flux fumes for once better late than never this is one of those repairs where there's so much context to be shared and it's difficult to do that within the span of one 15 or 20 minute video nonetheless i'm gonna try and do that bit by bit throughout this whole process my goal with this repair is to replace pairs of token caps so two token caps at a time to see if it'll resolve the yellow light of death issue and the consensus seems to be that if you're gonna try this approach start with the two capacitors on the back side of the gpu and everything i read about removing these two capacitors suggested that it is virtually impossible to remove them without destroying them but i wanted to try that for myself this is after about three minutes or so of heat and all that steam that's built up has literally created a hole through the lid of that component i'm not sure what these capacitor lids are made of if it's some sort of plastic or other type of resin but nonetheless it was not coming off gracefully and much like every other video i have seen on removing these i had to start peeling back the layers one by one where abandoning the hot air approach i'm convinced that this is as difficult as everyone said it would be and the reason that i don't want to introduce a lot of hot air to the board is because the way that some people temporarily repair their yellow light of death is by warming these capacitors up because somehow that impacts the chemistry and revives them temporarily but then the problem comes back and i really want this repair to be a measure of whether replacing them has a meaningful lasting impact on the yellow light of death so i don't want the board to get warm or a lot of heat to travel through the board and kind of mask my potential success because the board got warm and all the components got warm as opposed to these capacitors being faulty and replacing them resolving the issue and i know this looks terrific guys trust me i was cringing at every step of peeling these layers off but we're actually not even touching the board we're just prying the individual layers of this capacitor off you do have to be very careful here though because you apply a little bit of force and your hand slips and kind of goes the wrong way it is very easy to bump components off the board and they're so tiny you're going to have a really hard time trying to put them back on and you might not even be able to if you rip the traces off so just be careful and here we are speeding through the same process to its neighbor here are the replacement capacitors from mouser you can pause and take a look if you're interested you hear a lot about people using tantalum capacitors and you're going to hear that word a lot and i'm not using tantalum capacitors i'm using organic polymer capacitors and there's two reasons that i chose these capacitors the first is because they have three terminals instead of two and we'll see why that's useful in a minute and the second is because of their size they are just about as thick as the original token cap so we're not going to have any clearance issues when reassembling the board and that's a challenge that a lot of people run into with some of the larger caps that people use for this repair now i'm setting my iron to 420 here which is a much higher attempt than i would normally use working on any sort of board really but the ground plane is just so large on this board it's going to suck up so much heat so i want to clean these pads up and tend them and get them ready for the capacitors and you're going to need quite a bit of heat to do that comfortably here's a good shot of me trying to remove the leftover terminal from the previous token cap i actually had to remove these from a couple of these pads so just make sure you're removing the terminals if they're still there you're not just tinning right over them and here we can see how clean the pads turned out you know as traumatic as removing that capacitor later by layer looked they turned out quite good in the end now we're gonna have to install four capacitors to replace a single token cap and here you guys can see why i picked these capacitors whereas most people would install them diagonally so that the two terminals are touching the positive and negative i'm gonna be able to install them just cleanly vertically down like that now four capacitors at 470 microfarads each is 1880 which is quite a bit higher than the original capacitor that was there but that doesn't seem to be a big issue the biggest consideration when you're picking capacitors to replace the token caps is making sure you select low esr caps very high quality low esr caps if you're a little bit above in the rating it's still going to smooth out that signal for the gpu and you should be in good shape now i'm not nearly as comfortable with hot air as i am with an iron but practice makes perfect and i need to keep working on projects like this so that i build that comfort level so goes without saying i'm not offering any smd hot air tips here just enjoy watching me fumble through it but uh there are probably better channels that you can watch to really see this done on a much more professional level those of you that are familiar with this repair will notice that i haven't really mentioned anything about the polarity or how this circuit works in more detail and that's extremely relevant and important to understand but if you're considering doing this repair and you don't understand how it works watching one video isn't enough i highly recommend that you watch a bunch of videos and you read as much as you can to understand how the circuit works and why we're doing this while we're replacing four caps with one why they're connected the way that they are etc so i've added a bunch of links in the video description that i found helpful and helped me understand this circuit a little bit better i highly recommend you check it out if you're considering doing this repair now all i'm doing here is lining up the terminals a little bit better and then it's time to almost fully reassemble the unit to test it out while i'm doing that i want to briefly talk about something that i know a lot of you guys that are close to the ps3 and the yellow light of death repair are going to be curious about and that's cisco and if i had to try and relay my understanding of what that is using just one phrase i would say that there's a cisco chip on your ps3 that you can extract diagnostic messaging from over serial by soldering to specific connections on your motherboard and sending commands to your ps3 the challenge that i had taking that approach was it was a lot more complexity than i was willing to take on for this project i also think that the overall approach is still somewhat in its infancy the diagnostic messages are not fully set in stone some of them are but a lot of them aren't so it's certainly a more elegant approach to this repair in terms of going in a little bit better informed as opposed to blindly changing capacitors like i'm doing here and just hoping for the best but if you're a ps3 enthusiast definitely follow what's happening in the syscon world i'm sure the project's going to become more and more approachable as the documentation improves and more people have tried it and make better sense of the diagnostic messages well guys what do you think is going to happen are you rooting for me [Music] all right wow that's freaking cool man uh let's hook this thing up to a capture card and see if it's booting up [Music] we're still in black and white which means it thinks there's a component cable plugged in oh there we go [Music] randy is there a disc in here what you're joking nice okay cool it was pretty late at night but it was great to end the evening on a positive note and here we are the next day resuming the project i'm gonna quickly test the system battery it looks like it's holding a charge just above three volts i think that's good enough for me i'm not going to bother changing it for the system a lot of people ask me on my last ps3 video why i didn't remove the heat spreaders and apply thermal paste underneath them essentially delid the cpu and the gpu and the short answer is it's difficult my mate vince had a video about a year ago where right after he fixed a yellow light of death ps3 he ended up damaging it by trying to replace the thermal paste underneath the cpu and the gpu so i've already seen what can go wrong when you try and remove those heat spreaders because you're working in such a sensitive area and they're so difficult to remove but if you absolutely want to remove yours and you want to put fresh thermal paste underneath those heat spreaders i recommend the channel called nsc mods i'll link to his channel in the description below i recommend checking him out and good luck let me know how it goes i managed to find your replacement screw with the right thread spacing but it's just a little bit too long so i'm going to show you guys a cool way that you can trim a screw down using your crimp tool have you ever wondered what these holes at the top of your crimp tool are for they're precisely for this exact reason you just pop the screw in the right size hole and you crimp it shut to cut it down to the right size and as you can see the screw is the perfect height it is not touching the motherboard underneath so [Music] [Music] [Music] time for a final test just make sure everything's working i hooked up the system to the tv in my new game room and it powers up with the controller just fine takes a little while the first time you start the system up over hdmi so i sped through some of this footage but here we are on the dashboard and moving over to the user you can see this is still randy's console thank you randy i was able to connect to my wi-fi and update the firmware it was on 4.82 and now it's on 4.87 and the drive is working just fine yeah i'm just messing around with a game and i was able to play it without any issues so i think we have a fully working system here if you're thinking about working on your yellow light of death ps3 make sure you do your homework and just go into it with the right expectations it's not always going to work by replacing the token caps and i know that because i have another system where someone did replace them and it did not work alright guys i hope you enjoyed this repair and i will see you guys again soon take care you

Channel: Borderline OCD

Views: 458,719

Keywords: ps3 ylod, ps3 fat ylod, ps3 yellow light of death, ylod, ps3 flashing red light, ps3 3 beeps, ps3 doesn't turn on, ps3 not working, ps3 fat, ps3 phat, sony ps3 fat, ps3 restoration, ps3 repair, cechh01, cech-h01, playstation, playstation 3, sony, restore, restoration, repair, refurbish, console restoration, console repair, solder porn, soldering porn, ebay junk, asmr, retro, retro gaming, video games, video game consoles, vintage, vintage consoles, borderline ocd, borderlineocd

Id: Wfi5O_H6I2k

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021