Dealspwn writes: The YLOD. The Yellow Light of Death. This is the dreaded sickness that PlayStation 3 owners fear. With my PS3 nearing its sixth birthday, it finally happened to me. While hardly as prevalent as the Red Ring of Death in the Xbox 360’s early days, the flashing yellow light is still cautiously feared amongst the PS3 community.
In order to cope with this grim occurrence I’ve incorporated the experience into my regular feature, The Sunday Seven. This isn’t a guide on how to fix the problem yourself, no, no, that’s a different fire hazard for a different day and for someone else to tell. This is what was running through my mind as I tried to come to terms with it and ultimately how to bring it back to life.
Hopefully, this won’t happen to you. So use this as a cautionary tale, an amusing anecdote by someone clearly a bit too much attached to a console or as a comparable accompaniment to your own past woes. Let’s face it; this is probably some form of karmic retribution any smugness of having a PS3 when everyone’s 360s were melting.
0°
10°
10°
30°
Ad 
0°
There was no way for me to have known this early in the ylod epidemic, but changing the thermo compound after owning a ps3 for five years will prevent the ylod.
"There was no way for me to have known this early in the ylod epidemic, but changing the thermo compound after owning a ps3 for five years will prevent the ylod."
Changing the thermo will make it last a bit longer, but not much. To properly fix it, you need to get it re-balled with leaded solder (The Xbox and PS3 both use that cheap crappy lead free solder).
Most people probably know it's over heat, but they never stop to think why it over heated.
Overheat causes the circuits on the board to melt, and it's likely to snap during cool down, which will cause RROD or YLOD. 360 had a bad design not letting the heat properly escape, so it made it more likely for the RROD to happen.
But older systems are at risk of overheating due to dust clogging up the ventilation. (For new systems too if you don't put it in the ventilated place for the heat to escape)
The fix is called re-flowing by melting the circuits to try to reconnect the snapped circuit back together.
Because for time consuming and other reasons, people can't tell exactly which one of the circuit is snapped so they melt everything, and there's no guarantee every line well melt back properly and evenly, which is why your system is likely to break (circuit snapping again) after it's fixed.
So, if you have an older system you should just air blow it and keep the ventilation clean and clog free. Cuz dust is going to build up no matter what. And you really only have yourself to blame if it dies. (well there's also the likely hood of drive failure but that's the same for all PC parts and is easier to replace w/o worrying of the same part breaking down again)
I had the ylod 4 years ago and look online on how to fix it. I re-thermaled it and it was fixed for about 2 months then i got it again. I did research and found that you have to re-ball it. I didn't want to do that so I cut two openings in the ps3 where the problem was and intergrated two large computer fans on it. So when the ps3 is turned one of the fan would turn on and blow cool air into it, the other would suck out the hot air to keep the ps3 cool. The air inside the ps3 would always be circulated with cold air. The same ps3 been working for 4 years now. I play gran turismo 5 on it and leave it on for hours while I go to work.
Some kid will get a broken PS3 because of you. So selfish."
"cleverusername
So then some poor gamer ended up buying it just for it to break within days!"
Calm down kiddies, Gamestop warranties their systems to work for 30 days, and I know for a fact that that system died in a matter of an hour or less! So if some little kid suffered it was only until he got the replacement, had it not been that way I probably wouldn't have done it.
Will someone please think of the children, oh the humanity... They should've bought a Wii lol!
I always thought it would have been good on the parts of companies to offer some reward system for early buyers-- throw in some older games for free, start them with some online store credit, discount prices on games, etc., but I guess they can always rely on the diehard fans to sell to.
My friend came up with the ingenius solution to pull the face plate and body plates off and vaccuum clean the vents out...turns out there was tons of dust stuck in there too so that probably also created the problem hahaha. Also surprisingly, I had not really heard of YLOD before then, and suddenly my friend and 4 other playstation guys in our high school at the time all had the YLOD pretty close to one another (these were launch PS3's)
Other than that, I got a replacement, then sold it to a friend and I bought a Xbox 360 "slim" and it works perfectly.
My fatty is still working after ylod fix but my laser is dead again for the third time.
So why would I even consider buying ps4 before Sony irons it out with ps4 slim?
But that doesn't make me a Sony belivever or worshiper.
In fact I belive that ps3 will be the last Sony product I have ever bought.
I've had an xbox, but that got RRoD
If your PS3's fans are kicking in significantly louder and longer than when you 1st bought it.....it's not a magical reason.......
It's generally because your thermal paste is drying out.
http://www.youtube.com/watc... <------- 6:00 mark
Change paste immediately.
If you're too afraid to open your PS3, I recommend looking for a mom & pop type of shop in your area. Craigslist has some in my area.... probably yours too.
Good luck
PS....I've changed mine, so PM me if there's anyone with questions :)
What truth?
There is no YLOD.
http://9gag.com/gag/5980001
I remember I once got it when Halo 3 came out...waited all year for the sequel and I had to send my 360 away on the day it came out :|
Missed my 360 though cause it heated up my bedroom lol
I guess if it ever does happen I at least have the technical skills to fix it, but I know I never sleep at night.
Seriously, though, it's an occurrence that's uncommon; by all accounts, it occurs within acceptable the limits for faulty hardware rates. Sucks when it happens, but... out of the people I know with a PS3, or that have EVER owned a PS3, only one has had YLOD. And that one instance was about four or five years ago.
'Up to' four?
Surely if this was true you'd know exactly how many times you'd had an YLoD, rather than giving an approximation of anywhere between one and four times...
I, unfortunately, did see my launch console break in this way, but that was after a year of its fans being EXTREMELY loud. In a way, that was a warning.
I'm not at all bitter. I got several years out of it, and I was very pleased with my slim replacement, which hasn't had a single problem! It also meant that I could upgrade my HDD, which is something I needed to do anyway.
PS3 comes in at an 8%
Wii comes in at 1%
and the 360 comes in at a WHOPPING 42% freaking failure rate!
"To make matters worse for Xbox owners, 55 percent of those with failures have needed more than one repair or replacement, and 39 percent have had to repair or replace their consoles more than two times."
DAMN!
@Hicken
Same here, I only know like one person who has gotten the YLOD. But he bought it at launch and it only died like a few months ago. lol
Sorry but RROD got fixed past the half way life cycle, and that is not acceptable IMO
Not for the first 1-2 years they didn't.
The reason it wasn't an issue later on later models was that die shrinks reduced the amount of heat produced by the CPUs and GPUs in both consoles.
Thankfully the YLOD isn't a huge problem.
The biggest reason for it was if air flow were prevented with the system it could get too hot which could cause the solder points on some of the chips to become weak or break so they wouldn't make contact with the board.
Best way to keep this from happening is vacuuming out the air vents once a month or so, particularly if you have a dusty place. Also not best to keep it in a cabinet that is entirely closed, or keep it above another component that generates a lot of heat, like a stereo receiver.
If you know your fan has gone bad you should look into replacing it, as it's easier than waiting for the system to just overheat. Keep in mind though that a loud fan doesn't mean that it's a bad fan, so use your discretion.
Only Lasted 2 Years =(
probably and hopefully it won't
but my ps3 has some slowdown occasionally so it might
be passing away
no matter i've had it for pretty long time at this point
i'm probably going to get the new slim model after it breaks
well, if ps4 isn't out at time yet
I have started using the cloud backup option now, luckily I wasn't in the middle of anything major at the time. Had it happened 20 hours into Ni No Kuni I probably would have been sick.
With that said, i am worried about my ps3. It has a monster number of miles on it and was the work horse for most of this gen despite owning a nice gaming rig, xbox, and Wii. The fan starts up immediately after i hit the power button now and i swear the thing was sweating while running the GoW Ascension demo...
I remember cradling my first Xbox 360 in a towel, desperately hoping that the heat sink adhesive would re-melt and slip back into its proper place. Oh Microsoft, you sharks.
Thankfully my PS3 has never YLOD'd on me...yet. Although it did develop a temporary fault of burning an unreadable ring into blu-ray discs a year ago. That was fun.
My 360 died midway through Rainbow 6 Vegas I think, RRoD but was thankfully still under warranty many, many moons ago and was repaired by MS.
What did you use?