Preface (you can skip this):
Roughly 6 years ago my Godfather bought me a Playstation 3 Slim, and act that quickly propelled him to "The Godfather" (yes, they made a movie after him).
However, he bought this PS3 from semi-questionable sources and at launch this bad boy was loud. Very loud. So, being the hardware guy I am I decided to open her up and see if she needed a cleaning, new paste, etc.
***This thing was filthy***. The most disgusting console I have ever opened in my life. It looked like someone spilled coffee around the blu-ray drive, there was several pockets of dust bunnies that more closely resembled dirt piles, and my god oily dust on every surface. My first reaction after opening it up was to go outside and shake the thing onto the grass.
It was so bad I've done not one, not two, but three deep cleans of this system, something I've done for no other console in my possession, and only after the most recent "clean" can I say it's decent.
As an enthusiast (idiot), I've always tried to squeeze the most performance out of those pretty prebuilt boxes. Knowing that PS3's have lifespan issues (mostly pertaining to the FAT models but I wanna be funny here), I decided to destroy my PS3 as quickly as possible. Live fast die faster motherfu-.
Anyways...
The PS3 in Question...
(section added 4/10/23)
...is a PS3 Slim CECH-20xx. Meaning it has NEC Tokens and a 65nm GPU. Later PS3 Slim models would replace the NEC Tokens, and even later-er models would reduce the GPU to 40nm. Basically, this launch model Slim is the worst model Slim and should have the worst temps of them all (in theory), albeit still better temps than any Phat model.
"Unrelated" stuff I did to the PS3:
So this PS3 has been through a lot. The PSU had issues about a year ago, before I even CFW'd it, and the potentiometer's had to be adjusted. For whatever reason the red standby light on this thing does not appear anymore. Thinking about this makes me scared and I'd like to not anymore.
The blu-ray drive has been cleaned out because someone spilled what I hope is coffee in it. Please be coffee. Please.
Finally, I casually broke the CMOS battery holder recently and am awaiting a replacement, so don't question that too much in the images I provide.
The Goal:
A couple of semi-conflicting goals:
Performance:
The first improvement to the PS3's performance is perhaps the most obvious; swapping the hard drive from a 5400 RPM HDD to an SSD.
"BUT PARIS "PHOENIX" PHI" I hear someone shouting from the back of the class "THE PS3 HAS A SATA I INTERFACE AND THUS CANNOT TAKE FULL ADVANTAGE OF THE SSD'S IMPROVED PERFORMANCE"
Couple things there:
Improvements I've noticed personally with my system:
It is possible to overclock the PS3 with custom firmware. Personally I use an Evilnat CFW with the RSX 600/750 overclock. Overclocking increases temps and should only be considered if your console doesn't have any overheating problems. I only did overclocking after a variety of cooling improvements, cleanings, and swapping the drive. If your PS3 overheats and you just wanna install the CFW before cracking open the console, for the love of God don't.
I've had pretty solid results with the above two changes. Games like Yakuza: Dead Souls are a lot more playable than their original states.
Cooling:
Improving the cooling of the PS3 Slim has a lot less resources than improving a PS3 FAT, due to the fact that the Slim doesn't miraculously die as a result of a Nvidia oversight. But generally there's four aspects of the PS3's cooling I want to highlight, and a much riskier one I want to mention briefly:
The first is pretty obvious. Having a ton of dust in your console is gonna make it harder for air to circulate, easier for heat to accumulate, and your console is gonna overheat at some point. The cooler your system the better it will perform, your console doesn't want to be 75+ degrees Celsius trust me.
When cleaning the console the first thing to look for is vent obstructions. On the left and right of the console, in the middle of the shell, there are vents underneath the system that act as the air intake.
These should be cleared of any debris. From there, make sure there's no dust buildups, get a cloth-you-trust and gently wipe down the inside of the console. Remove the fan, and clean the individual blades of test. Shoot some compressed air into the heatsink.
Look, dude, just be meticulous. Roleplay my grandmother whenever she comes over my house. The PS3 is my "filthy" kitchen, and you're not leaving until it's spotless (love her to death but I don't know why she keeps trying to wax my floors every time she comes over! Vavo please you don't need to do this).
2)
Alright lets talk thermal paste. I'm not gonna debate exactly how you apply thermal paste, that's what formal education is for. Just clean off the old thermal paste from the RSX/ Cell and reapply the proper peer-reviewed amount.
I used MX-6 thermal paste.
Slightly more thermal paste was used after I took this image, but these pics show the paste and pads.
3)
Thermal pads are the often forgotten brother of PS3 cooling. Certain chips on the motherboard get a little toasty, and these handy pads keep em cool. Generally for the PS3 Slim I would advise 1.5 or 2 inch pads. I used 2.5 inch pads and I feel as though they're a bit too "thicc". I SHOULD get some smaller ones but I'm kiiiinda broke and I don't feel like shoplifting a Microcenter. I've included an image of my thermal pads, if you see a chip I missed please let me know as this information is almost impossible to find online.
The thermal pads I used are of the thermalright brand.
There's also the "eraser mod", in which an office eraser piece is placed on the underside of the Cell processor to apply extra pressure and for a lot of people this actually reduces temps by quite a bit (visible in the second pic above in the paste section). This is the only "controversial psuedo science" improvement I've listed, critics argue this can cause motherboard warping HOWEVER Sony themselves actually added a plastic piece to certain PS3 models as show in the below video, so it likely has some merit.
I used a thermal pad in place of an eraser as I didn't feel like shoplifting a Staples.
2.5)
A bit of an out-of-order note, do not substitute thermal paste for thermal pads. If a chip should have a thermal pad, slapping thermal paste on it is stupid. Thermal pads often bridge gaps that paste alone can't bridge. If you're getting bad temps after installing pads, the pads are likely the wrong side. Do not smear a bunch of paste in place of proper pads.
4)
I did a lot of research on this. By "a lot of research" I mean I did like a four hour binge search while I was super sick one day (which has been every day for the past seven months, love me some GI issues). The best fan I could find, that's a mix of low noise and lowered temperatures, is the 17 Blade Delta fan. I bought this bad Larry and it's a lot quieter than my old 21 blade fan with about the same temps. I don't know why, I don't question it.
The PS3 is a god damn loud console and I truly recommend prioritizing fan noise over fan efficiency. You can do a lot of things to reduce temperatures (HDD to SSD, thermal paste, pads, cleaning, etc) but you can't do much to curb the noise produced by whatever fan you got other than reducing the speed of it. A quieter fan that you can enable to run faster will be a bigger chick magnet (I ran out of adjectives) than a loud ass fan running at low speeds.
5)
Delidding is a risky play to further reduce the temps of your RSX/ Cell. You need real balls to attempt this, however, and if you've done it I take my hat off to you sir/madam. Videos can be found on YouTube that demonstrate various approaches to it, the Slim doesn't really need delidding from what I've seen and it should only be done after you've done everything else for the system/ you're really damn bored.
Results
After all this, here's some pics of my PS3 running video games (Yakuza: Dead Souls to be precise). Games run better than before, the console is quieter than ever, and temps are still pretty good. All in all, this was a fun adventure and I look forward to telling you all about my next (or previous) modding adventure. If you have any comments/ questions please feel free, it's a thread!
CPU temps hover around 58-63 C, GPU hovers around 62-69 C. Fan speed is usually 33%, hovers around 25-44 (50% at most).
Roughly 6 years ago my Godfather bought me a Playstation 3 Slim, and act that quickly propelled him to "The Godfather" (yes, they made a movie after him).
However, he bought this PS3 from semi-questionable sources and at launch this bad boy was loud. Very loud. So, being the hardware guy I am I decided to open her up and see if she needed a cleaning, new paste, etc.
***This thing was filthy***. The most disgusting console I have ever opened in my life. It looked like someone spilled coffee around the blu-ray drive, there was several pockets of dust bunnies that more closely resembled dirt piles, and my god oily dust on every surface. My first reaction after opening it up was to go outside and shake the thing onto the grass.
It was so bad I've done not one, not two, but three deep cleans of this system, something I've done for no other console in my possession, and only after the most recent "clean" can I say it's decent.
As an enthusiast (idiot), I've always tried to squeeze the most performance out of those pretty prebuilt boxes. Knowing that PS3's have lifespan issues (mostly pertaining to the FAT models but I wanna be funny here), I decided to destroy my PS3 as quickly as possible. Live fast die faster motherfu-.
Anyways...
The PS3 in Question...
(section added 4/10/23)
...is a PS3 Slim CECH-20xx. Meaning it has NEC Tokens and a 65nm GPU. Later PS3 Slim models would replace the NEC Tokens, and even later-er models would reduce the GPU to 40nm. Basically, this launch model Slim is the worst model Slim and should have the worst temps of them all (in theory), albeit still better temps than any Phat model.
"Unrelated" stuff I did to the PS3:
So this PS3 has been through a lot. The PSU had issues about a year ago, before I even CFW'd it, and the potentiometer's had to be adjusted. For whatever reason the red standby light on this thing does not appear anymore. Thinking about this makes me scared and I'd like to not anymore.
The blu-ray drive has been cleaned out because someone spilled what I hope is coffee in it. Please be coffee. Please.
Finally, I casually broke the CMOS battery holder recently and am awaiting a replacement, so don't question that too much in the images I provide.
The Goal:
A couple of semi-conflicting goals:
- Improve the performance
- Reduce the fan noise
- Try to keep the system as cool as possible with the other two goals in mind
Performance:
The first improvement to the PS3's performance is perhaps the most obvious; swapping the hard drive from a 5400 RPM HDD to an SSD.
"BUT PARIS "PHOENIX" PHI" I hear someone shouting from the back of the class "THE PS3 HAS A SATA I INTERFACE AND THUS CANNOT TAKE FULL ADVANTAGE OF THE SSD'S IMPROVED PERFORMANCE"
Couple things there:
- 5400 RPM drives offer (on average) 100 mb/s, 7200 RPM drives offer 120 mb/s, SSD's can easily hit the 150 mb/s cap
- While sustained read/ write speeds are only 50-25% better, Random Read Write speeds on an SSD are significantly higher, and this in particular is most important
- SSDs don't produce nearly as much heat as HDDs. Bad when your landlord cuts off the heating but otherwise good for improved temps
- This generally won't improve disc copying speeds as Blu-Ray bandwidth is capped to 36 mb/s. The more something is on the drive, the better. Games like Shadows of the Damned with virtually no install get no real improvements, but a digital version of the game should in theory benefit
Improvements I've noticed personally with my system:
- Greatly improved operating system UI. Moving between menus, opening the trophy menu, etc ESPECIALLY when I'm already in game is so much better. I'm on the 2nd-latest firmware rn and it's smooooth.
- Generally lower load times in games with installs. Metal Gear Solid 4, The Last of Us, and NieR all had notably better loads
- "Loading stutter" is much less apparent. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance likes to load assets during or after codec calls and the game has a slight "stutter" where the framerate dips. Having an SSD practically eliminates this
- Texture pop-in is also much less apparent, noticeable in games like Rage
It is possible to overclock the PS3 with custom firmware. Personally I use an Evilnat CFW with the RSX 600/750 overclock. Overclocking increases temps and should only be considered if your console doesn't have any overheating problems. I only did overclocking after a variety of cooling improvements, cleanings, and swapping the drive. If your PS3 overheats and you just wanna install the CFW before cracking open the console, for the love of God don't.
I've had pretty solid results with the above two changes. Games like Yakuza: Dead Souls are a lot more playable than their original states.
Cooling:
Improving the cooling of the PS3 Slim has a lot less resources than improving a PS3 FAT, due to the fact that the Slim doesn't miraculously die as a result of a Nvidia oversight. But generally there's four aspects of the PS3's cooling I want to highlight, and a much riskier one I want to mention briefly:
- Ensuring the airflow is unobstructed
- Thermal paste on the RSX/ Cell
- See 2.5 as well
- Thermal pads on relevant chips
- See 2.5 as well
- The model fan used
- Delidding (scary)
The first is pretty obvious. Having a ton of dust in your console is gonna make it harder for air to circulate, easier for heat to accumulate, and your console is gonna overheat at some point. The cooler your system the better it will perform, your console doesn't want to be 75+ degrees Celsius trust me.
When cleaning the console the first thing to look for is vent obstructions. On the left and right of the console, in the middle of the shell, there are vents underneath the system that act as the air intake.
These should be cleared of any debris. From there, make sure there's no dust buildups, get a cloth-you-trust and gently wipe down the inside of the console. Remove the fan, and clean the individual blades of test. Shoot some compressed air into the heatsink.
Look, dude, just be meticulous. Roleplay my grandmother whenever she comes over my house. The PS3 is my "filthy" kitchen, and you're not leaving until it's spotless (love her to death but I don't know why she keeps trying to wax my floors every time she comes over! Vavo please you don't need to do this).
2)
Alright lets talk thermal paste. I'm not gonna debate exactly how you apply thermal paste, that's what formal education is for. Just clean off the old thermal paste from the RSX/ Cell and reapply the proper peer-reviewed amount.
I used MX-6 thermal paste.
Slightly more thermal paste was used after I took this image, but these pics show the paste and pads.
3)
Thermal pads are the often forgotten brother of PS3 cooling. Certain chips on the motherboard get a little toasty, and these handy pads keep em cool. Generally for the PS3 Slim I would advise 1.5 or 2 inch pads. I used 2.5 inch pads and I feel as though they're a bit too "thicc". I SHOULD get some smaller ones but I'm kiiiinda broke and I don't feel like shoplifting a Microcenter. I've included an image of my thermal pads, if you see a chip I missed please let me know as this information is almost impossible to find online.
The thermal pads I used are of the thermalright brand.
There's also the "eraser mod", in which an office eraser piece is placed on the underside of the Cell processor to apply extra pressure and for a lot of people this actually reduces temps by quite a bit (visible in the second pic above in the paste section). This is the only "controversial psuedo science" improvement I've listed, critics argue this can cause motherboard warping HOWEVER Sony themselves actually added a plastic piece to certain PS3 models as show in the below video, so it likely has some merit.
I used a thermal pad in place of an eraser as I didn't feel like shoplifting a Staples.
2.5)
A bit of an out-of-order note, do not substitute thermal paste for thermal pads. If a chip should have a thermal pad, slapping thermal paste on it is stupid. Thermal pads often bridge gaps that paste alone can't bridge. If you're getting bad temps after installing pads, the pads are likely the wrong side. Do not smear a bunch of paste in place of proper pads.
4)
I did a lot of research on this. By "a lot of research" I mean I did like a four hour binge search while I was super sick one day (which has been every day for the past seven months, love me some GI issues). The best fan I could find, that's a mix of low noise and lowered temperatures, is the 17 Blade Delta fan. I bought this bad Larry and it's a lot quieter than my old 21 blade fan with about the same temps. I don't know why, I don't question it.
The PS3 is a god damn loud console and I truly recommend prioritizing fan noise over fan efficiency. You can do a lot of things to reduce temperatures (HDD to SSD, thermal paste, pads, cleaning, etc) but you can't do much to curb the noise produced by whatever fan you got other than reducing the speed of it. A quieter fan that you can enable to run faster will be a bigger chick magnet (I ran out of adjectives) than a loud ass fan running at low speeds.
5)
Delidding is a risky play to further reduce the temps of your RSX/ Cell. You need real balls to attempt this, however, and if you've done it I take my hat off to you sir/madam. Videos can be found on YouTube that demonstrate various approaches to it, the Slim doesn't really need delidding from what I've seen and it should only be done after you've done everything else for the system/ you're really damn bored.
Results
After all this, here's some pics of my PS3 running video games (Yakuza: Dead Souls to be precise). Games run better than before, the console is quieter than ever, and temps are still pretty good. All in all, this was a fun adventure and I look forward to telling you all about my next (or previous) modding adventure. If you have any comments/ questions please feel free, it's a thread!
CPU temps hover around 58-63 C, GPU hovers around 62-69 C. Fan speed is usually 33%, hovers around 25-44 (50% at most).
Last edited by P_H_I,
