I didn’t want to send mine to Sony for a couple of reasons:
I had read they don’t always send you back your original unit. They’ll send you back an equivalent refurbished model. It will have a reformatted hard drive instead of your original one. I hope you backed up everything you wanted to keep.
If they do send your original PS3, they will use the same unleaded solder that was originally used in manufacture. Independent refurbishers will use leaded solder that will stand up to heat better and provides a longer lasting repair.
I know you’ve already sent yours in, so I wish you good luck with the repair.
Also, a tip for when you get it back: Don’t play it more than a couple of hours at a time for the first 25 hours of play to give the solder a chance to cure. Make sure you turn it completely off and let it cool between gaming cycles instead of leaving it powered on.
The thing is, for about 10 years of my career I was involved in semiconductor reliability and qualification. Thermal issues with solder ball cracking would have absolutely been determined before proceeding into production status. Any reputable company would have performed the requisite qualification testing, and either would have turned a blind eye to the results, or would have changed something in the solder ball formulation, the substrate solder pad properties, or the recommended operating environment for the substrate/pad/ball/board configuration.
Sony ain’t a slouch of a company, and all of these reliability tests are very, very common in the industry, so I have a hard time believing that the root cause would be something that would be most certainly known while reliability testing was performed.
Then again, I guess time-to-market for this industry might trump reliability.
Yeah, probably. Most of the problems reported with PS3’s have been with the older fat models. Sony did redesign the PS3 and released a slim model which seems to have fewer problems.
Microsoft also had problems at launch with their XBox 360, which had the infamous Red Ring of Death. They also redesigned the 360 and fewer problems reported. it seems nowadays that anyone who buys an electronic item right away is acting as a beta tester.
And don’t forget, I have a launch PS3 which was manufactured in 2006 and just now failed, so I’d say six years has been a pretty good run. And since the problem was so well documented, I was lucky it proved to be a simple fix. And I don’t think the failure rate is all that big out of the 58 million PS3’s that have been sold worldwide.
I got it back yesterday. It was a replacement, but it was the same model. I bought a slim in the meantime, so this one will be retired to a room where it won’t get as much use. It went YLOD before I had a chance to back up any of my game data, so I was SOL there anyway.
FWIW, I went through three “phats” - two ylods and one cooling system (fan) failure. Luckily they all were covered by extended warranties but I finally sold my refurb unit on eBay and bought a slim. I followed this issue fornsome time on avsforum - seems like a lot of people who had them repaired later experienced the same issue, but those were mostly re-flows. If you need to recover the data on your hdd it’s probably a worthwhile option for e short term, but my advice would be to get a slim and ps2 as Sony certainly seems to have worked out some bugs in the initial manufacturing process (frankly I’m surprised they have not gotten more heat over this issue - I’ve read that they claim only 2-3 percent overall failure rates (which they cited as within norms for such a product) but it seems to be more common than that. I’m speaking anecdotally of course ( based on my personal experience, that of friends, and some informal polling at avsforum). Im personally reluctant to buy their next gen system due to this (and some of their other failures in this area - data breach, removing features fromlter models, etc, but that is another topic.
It’s interesting that Sony has gotten such a pass on this issue. Microsoft got pummeled over RRODs on the 360. They claimed much the same failure rate but it was actually much higher than their numbers on the first generation. At least with the removable memory you had the ability to save everything, assuming you didn’t zorch your memory pack.
Game consoles seem to have gone the way of cars: if you buy them as soon as they come out you’re paying for the privilege of beta testing them. Some last forever, most go bad and have to be fixed.
What really burns me is that Sony seems to have gotten away with sweeping this under the rug…perhaps its not to the same scale as the 360s RROD, but its hard to know - to their credit Microsoft acknowledged an issue and stood behind their product with extended warranties and replacement programs…I have both consoles (purchased the 360 just recently) and after having owned ps1-3 will likely not purchase their next gen console.
I just noticed some new replies to this thread. Just to update now, it’s been 23 days since I got my PS3 back from the repair guy and it’s still working fine and seems just as good as the day I bought it. I know that’s very little to go by, but for now, I’m very satisfied with the repair.
I dunno either but I have had similar problems with a Sony PS2, an HP laptop, and 2 portable DVD players( Sony and Phillips).In all four cases it was bad solder joints at the GPU.
HP was the only company that had issued a recall on the laptop but I missed the window. They offered a one time fix for $299 but I opted out and reflowed my motherboard myself in the oven, DIY.
btw cochrane, thanks for the tip about lead solder.
What is the latest cochrane? Is it still working? I just purchased a PS3 60GB model off of ebay for $250. It’s supposedly brand new and has never been tampered with as far as the seal being removed. I was wondering if maybe I should get it reballed now or just use it til it fails and then have the GPU reballed. I still have my original 60gb launch model but it eventually failed and had the YLOD. I had it professionally reflowed twice now but it failed shortly afterwards. . . however, I’m not sure if that was a result of me tampering with it first. I just want a backwards compatible phat ps3 model. I liked the look and feel of the original PS3 compared to the newest model sony has out now.
