Thursday, May 26, 2011

PS3 Thermal behavior identification

Hi,

Thanks to my tool I was thinking that I could do several things :

- A least ! I will be able to answer if the PS3 heats more when placed vertically or horizontally !
- Compare the temperature with and without case
- Compare the temperature between 40Go and 60Go

To do this, the first test step is to power up the PS3 and let it warm up for a defined time. The PS3 should always start from the same cold state which will be ambient temperature, so I will have to do each test when ambient temperature is always the same for the test to be relevant, otherwise I will have to do corrections on measurements.

A second step would be to do a test launching a blue ray for example.

If you have other test ideas, feel free to participate!

Results coming soon !

I'm modifying design to have it smaller, in order to fit in a CPLD and make my own electronic board ! So it takes some time and results will be delayed.

You surely have noticed but I don't have much time to work on this !
....

Friday, May 6, 2011

Thermal probe diagnosis tool

Hi,

I have made a direct application of my brand new thermal probe tool !

I had to repair a 60Go PS3 which was in YLOD.

I repaired it, and when I started it over, fan started to increase regurarly to reach full speed and to finally shut down the PS3 with the thermal warning message in the XMB.

So I probed the thermal probes of this PS3 and captured my tool's log in order to extract data. After some manipulations of the data I created 3 files for each probe of the PS3. Here are the graphics for each probe of the PS 3 :

Motherboard Probe graphic :




CELL Probe graphic :




RSX Probe graphic :




Measures are pretty relevant and thanks to them I clearly see that the CELL processor has its temperature rising and reaching the 85°C (which is the default thresholds of the thermal probes components) that generates the thermal alert interruption signal to the chipset, which leads the system to shut down with thermal alert message.

This confirms the fact that I used flux for the RSX during reflow and not for the CELL. I will have to run it again with flux on the cell this time, and I will check if there is some short circuit near the CELL.

So it is pretty fun to see that my tool works for diagnosis!