Tbone: I bought some decent thermal paste at Best buy, I took the consoles apart, basically breaking em down to their component parts. I removed Sonys horrible Thermsl Paste job completely from the CPU and GPU. I used straight up Isopropyl Alcohol. Then I wrapped the entire board in tin foil, only leaving those 2 main processor chips exposed. I grabbed a semi deep style cake pan and pkaced the board on top of it so that air go above and underneath it. I turned my oven on 200 and placed the board on the pan in right away, no preheating, for 10 minutes. Then after the 10 minutes, I kicked it up to 450 for another 5 minutes, then I shut it off and left it sit in there for about 2 hours or so. I took it out and removed the tinfoil, it was completely cooled, I reapplied the Thermal Paste the Correct way, not globbing it all over, just a Pea size or so in the center of each Chip, that way when you put it back together and the Heatsinks push down, it spreads out very nicely. Then I reassembled and they both work perfectly. The fan even runs much more smoothly.
. This is by no means a Troll post. I Really did exactly what I described, Oven, Cake Pan, Tin foil and all. I have a Zero failure rate so far for it. The Oven seems to perfectly re liquify the broken solder joints evenly and by letting it cool, it perfectly sets. My oven didn't really smell weird either, cause I thought it might. I noticed a little smell the same day, but not the next day. I could probably do this for people and I wouldn't charge anything. I just like to help out fellow gamers. Sony will charge you insane amounts of money fir this and most of the time they just send you another console, which will probably have the same issue. Which said issue seems to be lazy ass application of the Thermal Paste, leading to cracking in those solder joints. They used very cheap Lead free solder I believe. It might not hurt to re paste a PS3 before it happens.
. it's funny you mention the hair dryer thing. That will actually destroy the console in the long run. Think about this: If the heat from the hair dryer is swelling the board to the point of temporarily liquifying the solder joints a bit, it's probably melting alot of other stuff. I would think that if you're just going that to trade in the console to Gamestop, then have at it I say. But that console will stop working again and be worse than it was. Although GS can afford to take a PS3 loss I'm sure!
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