Anyone with a fat PS3... just a reminder/PSA

Short version: Change your thermal paste!!   

Long version: I decided to play a PS2 RPG, picked out Rogue Galaxy after a lot of thinking, and decided to go for the real deal and play on my PS2. After a few hours, I got sick of a wired controller and decided to try my PS3 and it made the game much more enjoyable. But within 10 minutes, my PS3's third fan hit stage 3 and two days ago it hit stage 4 fan which was super rare, after half hour. I went back to my PS2 but wow, besides not having a wireless controller, the game just looked and ran so much worse. I never realized how much better PS2 games were on PS3 thanks to the faster drive and upscaling/smoothing. 

So I decided it was time to clean out my PS3 and change the thermal paste, as I couldn't remember the last time I did it. Researched show that Arctic Silver 5 was no longer the "go to" thermal paste (and hasn't been for a while) but I've been out of the PC hardware game that I didn't have the patient to learn all about thermal pastes and went with Arctic MX4, which isn't the best but seemed to be better than and had similar properties to AS5. 

Opened up my PS3, remembered how much of a bitch/how nerve wreaking it was since I have a pretty obscure model, and noticed that there was barely any dust inside... and started to worry that my system was dying (bought it midnight June 12, 2008 at Walmart! :lol. Finally got to the CPU/GPU and noticed the thermal paste was definitely looking crusty. So I cleaned it out, slapped on my new MX4 paste, put it back together and prayed as I plugged it in and it turned on. 

Played Rogue Galaxy for 15 minutes... fan never got past stage 2.  I wish I had more time to play but it's late here and I got work tomorrow. 

That's all. 

I've got a fat PS3/that I use for PS1 and PS2 games. I've never opened it tho, how hard is it to do this?

lhk57 said:

I've got a fat PS3/that I use for PS1 and PS2 games. I've never opened it tho, how hard is it to do this?

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It's not really hard, just time consuming. If you have the 20/60GB model, there are tons of guides that show you and the first time you do it, it might take 2-3 hrs just bc you'll prob be careful. The only hard part is that some pieces take some effort to pull off and you never really know how much but they're all for non-critical pieces (i.e., just the shell). Internal stuff is easily removed/re-attached, but there's more going with all the internal components of course (more stuff to remove/re-attach).

I have the 80GB MGS IV bundle (not the 40GB MGSIV gunmetal model) which is slightly diff and there's no guides on it but I was able to figure it out on my own.

But with that said, if you've never done it, I'm not sure it's worth it to do it now since all those years of use likely wore down the components quite a bit. The system is a decade old after all. I did this to my system on it's 2nd year and 4th or 5th years, before my most recent time.