A small guide about the Yellow Light of Death

Last edited by Leonidas on Sun Jul 10, 2011 1:28 pm; edited 1 time in total

I'm sick of having to explain everything on the chatbox so I created a thread where I will explain everything about it.

Yellow Light of Death
A small guide about the Yellow Light of Death Ylod

A small guide about the Yellow Light of Death Ylod

You know it, you hate it, you fear it, I'm pretty sure that the fear of your console freezing and then displaying that infamous Yellow Light rests at the back of your head every time you play.

What is the Yellow Light of Death?

It's the RROD's counterpart that plagues every PS3 on the planet.

What exactly does the YLOD do to your PS3?

Like the RROD it pretty much renders your console useless, no matter how many times you try to turn it on it will keep greeting you with the Yellow Light and then you'll hear three beeps and then your console will turn off with a continous red blinking light.

How did SONY respond to this?

By sticking their fingers in their ears, more or less. Their official statistic is that the failure rate is 0.5%, but that's also the same line that Microsoft tried to feed everybody when they first found out about their issues.

What is the PS3's failure rate?

If you are dumb enough to trust failure rates then I feel sorry for you.

What causes the Yellow Light of Death?

Many clueless individuals immedietly jump in to blame the victim that it was HIS fault that his PS3 died or they would simply say that you didn't keep your system clean or that it was getting too hot inside because of fluff.
Truth to be told, it's neither of those.
The Yellow Light of Death was, is and will always get caused by Bad Thermal Paste plus in the older models (40GB and 60GB) the cooling system wasn't correctly designed.

A small guide about the Yellow Light of Death 4220716081_efeba4b881

A small guide about the Yellow Light of Death 4220716081_efeba4b881

An example of a dried out thermal paste.

So let's get straight to the point, SONY uses a Ceramic Thermal Paste, that Paste dries out way too fast and it can cause severe problems.
The thermal paste's job is to keep the heatsink and the BGAs(CPU and GPU) in direct contact and to redirect the heat from the CPU and the GPU to the heatsink which in turn absorbs the heat.

Inside the PS3(60GB) there are two heatsinks, one for the CPU and one for the GPU, if you have your PS3 vertically whatever air that's blowing out of the top is the GPU's heatsink, whatever's blowing out of the back is the CPU's heatsink, the majority of the solder cracks are on the GPU, because the GPU's heatsink is smaller than the CPU's.
A small guide about the Yellow Light of Death Heatsink%2060Gb%20CECHC

A small guide about the Yellow Light of Death Heatsink%2060Gb%20CECHC

As the thermal paste inside your PS3 begins to dry out, you'll notice that the fan will start getting louder in a matter of minutes and it will blow out cold air from the back and thus the heatsink won't be absorbing the heat due to the thermal paste's situation.
These signs indicate that your PS3 is dying, because if the paste was a good one like the famous Artic Silver 5 and properly applied then the fan would have gotten louder after many hours and it would have been blowing out very hot air.
And when the Paste gets fully dried out then both the CPU and GPU will get as hot as a 280C microwave and then cause solder cracks on them(Most of them on the GPU if you had your PS3 vertically as I mentioned above) and then cause the PS3 to give you the infamous Yellow Light of Death.

How can I fix it?

You can't, even if you do all that reflow stuff you see on the internet you won't fix it permenently, it will die again after weeks or a few months at the most.
The only thing you can do is to send it to SONY and pay an outragious price of 160$ plus tax to get a refurbished PS3 which God knows if it works, or you could waste 299$ to buy a new PS3, bear in mind that ALL of your data is lost, if you try to put the HDD from your dead PS3 to another it will reformat, so backing it up in an external HDD is a must for you.

How can I prevent it from happening?

You know what Hippocrates said:
''κάλλιον το προλαμβάνειν του θεραπεύειν..''
Which means "It's better to Prevent it than curing it"

In order to prevent it, you have to do a long surgery on your PS3 and strip it down to the motherboard, doing this will VOID your warranty, unless you do a small trick that I will mention later.
There are videos that show you how to strip down yor PS3 I will post part 1 here:

What you need to do there is to remove the badly pasted Ceramic paste that SONY used from both BGAs and the heatsinks and then apply a better Thermal Paste on the BGAs, I recommend using an Arctic Silver 5, just make sure that no paste falls into the motherboard because that particular one is Electric Conductive.
You can see how to properly apply the paste on this video.

Also there are two clamps that are meant to apply pressure on the heatsink in order to keep it in contact with the BGAS, however, there are some situations where the heatsink is not in direct contact with the BGAs because the clams are not properly screwed in, you can try bending them in order to apply extra pressure on the heatsink.

Now for the trick to keep your warranty from getting voided, do this BEFORE you strip down your PS3.

And this concludes my guide about the Yellow Light of Death

Note: I bear no responsibility for any damage you cause to your PS3

I had a PS3(60 GB) die on me about 2 years ago and it had a copy of UFC Undisputed 2009 stuck in there. So I just wish SONY's PS4 ejects the game when your console dies, also my PS3(60GB) died around June/July and bought the new PS3 Slim(120) in September. So if this PS3 dies I'm still getting another one, unless it's already the start of next gen.

Grunt Leader **Stature** : 21

Actually you can still eject games even if you get the YLOD by using the "fan trick."

YLOD is a myth made up by Xbots to make their console seem like less of a failure. Much like Santa Claus and Slash, it doesn't exist.

yonny616 wrote:: I had a PS3(60 GB) die on me about 2 years ago and it had a copy of UFC Undisputed 2009 stuck in there. So I just wish SONY's PS4 ejects the game when your console dies, also my PS3(60GB) died around June/July and bought the new PS3 Slim(120) in September. So if this PS3 dies I'm still getting another one, unless it's already the start of next gen.

I just wish that the PS4 won't break at all. :x

Founding Father **Stature** : 264 **Playing** : Tu madre

Nice tutorial you got there, Leo. Very informative, very nice.

I think i read this on a web site once, did you copy and paste some of it?

I'd like to open my ps3 and fix it but i am much too lazy to do it, thus why i bought another one.

Lots of good info here.

igame wrote:: I think i read this on a web site once, did you copy and paste some of it?

I'd like to open my ps3 and fix it but i am much too lazy to do it, thus why i bought another one.

Lots of good info here.

Yes, I only copied and pasted Sony's response, I written the rest myself.

CernaMLD wrote:: Actually you can still eject games even if you get the YLOD by using the "fan trick."

It only works on the 20GB versions. Well that's what I've read around the web.

Grunt Leader **Stature** : 21

yonny616 wrote:

CernaMLD wrote:: Actually you can still eject games even if you get the YLOD by using the "fan trick."

It only works on the 20GB versions. Well that's what I've read around the web.

Yeahhhh... not true. Worked on my 40gb model. There are just different methods of activating it. Something about turning the 60gb, for example, upside down (lolwut).

CernaMLD wrote:

yonny616 wrote:

CernaMLD wrote:: Actually you can still eject games even if you get the YLOD by using the "fan trick."

It only works on the 20GB versions. Well that's what I've read around the web.

Yeahhhh... not true. Worked on my 40gb model. There are just different methods of activating it. Something about turning the 60gb, for example, upside down (lolwut).

Can the slim do the fan trick?

The Judge **Stature** : 88

I actually don't think I have ever heard a case of the slim getting the YLOD. anyone have?

chobo500 wrote:: I actually don't think I have ever heard a case of the slim getting the YLOD. anyone have?

Yup, even slims get the YLOD.

Damn, consoles seem to get less reliable each generation.

Alanski wrote:

CernaMLD wrote:

yonny616 wrote:

CernaMLD wrote:: Actually you can still eject games even if you get the YLOD by using the "fan trick."

It only works on the 20GB versions. Well that's what I've read around the web.

Yeahhhh... not true. Worked on my 40gb model. There are just different methods of activating it. Something about turning the 60gb, for example, upside down (lolwut).

Can the slim do the fan trick?

Yeah, all of them can but some don't eject the game like the 60gb version.

Thank god my 160 gb PS3 has been working fine since 2008.

» Official PlayStation Plus Thread
» Christmas light showdown
» Dying Light E3 2014 Trailer
» inFamous First Light E3 2014 Trailer
» Darksiders 2 & Metro: Last Light are "Superior" on the Wii U