I recently stated having issues...starting with "The Sabateur", then spreading to other games. Games would run fine for a while, then they would start to slow down (~10fps), then they would slow more (~1fps), then the system would freeze...no XMB or anything. Since this felt like what a computer does with bad memory, I decided to upgrade the memory cooling, and the chipset cooler while I was at it. Good news...IT FIXED THE PROBLEM...so far no crashes...and I even drove around in "The Sabateur" blowing crap up for about an hour (this would crash the system even before I started having problems). So, here is a pic of my mainboard now incase you need to do the same: All the coolers were found in my junk bin...so I don't know where you can get these specific heatsinks. I also cut a little bit of metal off of the lower cover to get some more airflow across the board: I almost hotwired the fan so it would run at full speed all the time...but that thing is figgin' loud at full speed...louder even than my computer that I had to move because it was too loud. Just in case you are wondering...the brown wire is the power wire for the fan.
Good to know, next time that i'll open my ps3 to clean it i will add them too. That type of HS's must be from a gfx card, maybe from an after market cooling kit. Thanks for sharing.
Very nice job. Did you have any problems with the original heat sink compound? Are the top's of the original heat sink plats flat/smooth? Definitly a different direction for fixing heat problems that has been talked about here. Should be able to place a small muffin fan over one of the heat sinks. Nice Job.
Only the cell and rsx had compound on them...the memory was cooled by 2 heatsinks that were embedded in the metal plate that I cut the hole in (at the left side of the pic I posted, you can see 4 rectangular holes...3 of them partly cutoff from the picture...this is where the stock memory coolers attached). The chipset was cooled by a piece of metal that came down from the same plate. Both the chipset and memory had black thermal pads that were extremely thick and conducted about as much heat as rubber. I did use a little bit of alcohol on all 5 chips before applying the acrtic adhesive, just to be sure they were clean. BTW...I think that the memory coolers were the ones that came with a zalman video card cooler...and I think the black heatsink is half of an old Pentium-100 cooler. I probably could have used more of it...but I cut it in half years ago...and I don't have the other half anymore.
