Reparing Your PS3′s Yellow Light of Death!

You know, it amazes me that for a machine that costs me nearly $600, it can malfunction so easily. I’m talking about my Playstation 3 console. Some gaming systems I’ve owned in the past includes Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Gameboy’s, Playstation 1 and 2, and Nintendo 64. Not one of them broke to the point where I have to actually open up the whole sucker and repair it like what I am doing here. A while back, my PS3 suffered the dreaded Yellow Light of Death (YLOD) and my machine basically turned into a very expensive paper weight. My warranty period was clearly over and so in order to fix the problem, I had to send it in to Sony and pay a fee of $150. Here’s the problem though. They’re not going to just fix my PS3 and give it back to me. They’re going to just hand me a refurbished unit (which most likely was turned in by another user with similar problems in the first place), slap on a short warranty period (I believe it’s for 90 days) for that second-hand console and call it a day. If the console breaks again after that warranty period, that’s going to cost you another $150. Um yeah, there was no way in hell I was going to go through with that plan. So, I set out to fix the darn problem myself and to my surprise, it’s actually a lot easier than you would think. This is all made possible due to the awesome citizens of Youtube and the Internet in general.

The Yellow Light of Death

If you experience the dreaded YLOD, all is not lost. A normal functioning PS3 should emit a green power status light. Any other color shows up and that’s usually a bad sign. In our YLOD situation, turning on your PS3 would immediately emit a blinking yellow light quickly followed by two/three red blinking lights along with some beeping noise. There are many causes as to why this is happening to your PS3 and so it’s really hard to pinpoint exactly where the fault lies. The red blinking light, according to Sony’s manual, indicates a overheating issue. They also tell you to stop using the system, let it cool down, and then turning it on again. This is bogus because it clearly doesn’t work in most cases. Therefore, from what I gathered, this is most likely a hardware issue. In most cases, it has to do with chips on the PS3 motherboard being dislocated and that new thermal paste is needed on the CPU and GPU. I’ve read somewhere that around 75-80 percent of PS3′s with the YLOD is caused by this issue. The unfortunate rest of the group have PS3′s with bad power supplies or other components, which can’t be so easily fixed. If you perform a quick search for the problem on Google, I’m sure you’ll find a lot of sources of information pertaining to this problem.

What Can You Do About It?

If you have in your hands right now a PS3 with the YLOD condition, you have one of four options. Buy a new PS3 for $299 and forget your old one ever existed, cough up $150 and send it in to Sony for a refurbished unit, spend some time and fix it yourself like a true geek, or pay someone else to do it for you. Obviously if you aren’t planning on sending it to Sony at all, then it’s worth a shot to try and repair it yourself before committing on purchasing a new one. What’s there to lose?

Getting Down to Business!

I will not be detailing the steps here to remedy your PS3 because there is a six part Youtube video series posted by member Gilksy1 that goes in lengthy details on how to perform the entire operation. I am posting the videos here because I have followed it and have revived my YLOD PS3. I will be in no way responsible for what happens to your PS3 should you attempt to perform the following repair operation. Once you remove the sticker on the side of your PS3 to remove the cover (which in essence allows you to completely disassemble your PS3), you void Sony’s warranty/contract and you will not be able to send it in if you so decide to in the future.

This repair operation involves cracking open your PS3 console to get to the motherboard.

What You’ll Need:

- Tamper Proof Torx 10 screwdriver. From all the videos and tutorials I have viewed, the author did not mention this. This piece is very important as the first screw you need to remove to get to the innards of your PS3 is a tamper proof Torx 10 screw. I had a really hard time looking for this screwdriver at my local stores. Most required me to buy a whole pack of Torx driver bits which was really expensive. In the end, I just ordered the drill bit on Ebay and borrowed a driver from a friend.

- #3 Phillips screwdriver. This is your standard Phillips screwdriver. You will use this to remove the majority of the screws on your PS3.

- #0 Phillips screwdriver. You will need this screwdriver to remove the two screws holding the hard drive caddy.

- Heat gun. This is the most expensive part. You will need a heat gun capable of producing at least 350 degree Celsius heat. Therefore, no, you cannot use your standard hair blow dryer because it doesn’t get that hot. Some heat guns (the cheaper one’s) give you just a low and high pre-adjusted temperature setting while the more expensive one’s allow you to manually adjust the temperature to your liking. Having the heat gun produce more than 350 degrees is fine but just make sure it’s not too high. For example, this is the heat gun I borrowed from a friend. On low setting, it produces 398 degrees Celsius of heat. Since this heat gun only costs around $22, I’m willing to take a chance with it (if I had to buy one). Since it produces higher heat temperature, I just hold the gun a little further away from the motherboard when performing the re-flow.

- 91% Isopropyl Rubbing Alcohol. You will need this to remove all the leftover thermal paste from the heat sink and on the CPU and GPU chips on the motherboard as well.

- Cotton swabs. Used in conjunction with the rubbing alcohol.

- Napkins. Used to wipe away thermal paste after dissolving it with the rubbing alcohol.

- Thermal paste. It is recommended that you purchase Arctic Silver 5. Thermal paste is spread on the chip dyes so that it can transfer the heat to the heat sink successfully.

- Egg carton. This isn’t really necessary but I highly recommend it. I use this to hold all the screws. Let me tell you now that there will be a lot of them. With the egg carton, you can put each category of screws in a separate compartment and then label them accordingly just to be sure you don’t get confused when you put your PS3 back together.

- Can of compressed air. Not necessary but this is a good way of getting rid of the dust accumulated within your PS3. No matter how clean you think you may have kept your PS3, having dust inside is inevitable.

- Large and empty working area. Not necessary but it’s so much easier to perform this operation on a large and empty table. There are a lot of parts you will be removing before you can get to the PS3′s motherboard so keeping track of them is much easier if everything is in one place!

Here is a picture I took of what it looks after fully disassembling a PS3:

Alright, so once you have all the parts gathered, you can begin the repair operation. Here is the six part video of how to fully repair your YLOD PS3. I strongly, and I mean strongly recommend that you at least watch all the videos once or twice fully through before doing anything to your PS3. You want to get a good feel for what you will be doing before actually doing it. Honestly though, the only hardest parts many people will experience is using the heat gun to properly re-flow the motherboard along with how to correctly apply thermal paste. Look over these videos along with other videos you can find on Youtube if you are not sure of how to perform a certain procedure.

Here is Gilksy1′s Youtube homepage where the videos can also be found.

I love the videos because the author actually recorded how to put your entire PS3 back together once you have repaired the motherboard. Most videos show you how to take it apart and repair it but then skip right to the part where they show you that the method actually works by turning on the PS3 and the removal of the YLOD.

Good luck!

Upon successfully fixing my PS3 using the described method in this article, it broken down once again shortly thereafter. I got a good 3 months out of it before the same error appeared.

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In the End…

No sane customer should have to go through this with their PS3 but if your warranty has expired and you are dead set on not paying Sony the $150, this is your only solution, other than giving it to someone else to help fix it for you. As a tech guy, I understand that electronics eventually will break down but what really pisses me off is that I hardly use the console and yet it still broke down on me. I understand if I played on the console 6-7 hours a day but most of the time I hardly even log that much hours in a single week! Yes, very pathetic indeed to have it break down under those conditions. I was extremely happy once I turned on the PS3 after the repair to find that everything is back in working order but I can’t help but wonder how long will this fix last? The repair definitely isn’t permanent and so I can only hope that it will be a long time before I have to crack it open again!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me and I’ll help in the best way I can. I’m no expert at this by any means but I’ll try to help out wherever I can.

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