[sxbarnes]

After repairing and performing post-mortum on numerous PS3 consoles and casting a critical eye at the empirical evidence and hardware aspects involved there is only one possible conclusion that can be arrived at... NO PS3 was EVER designed to be operated while standing on end!

Doing so WILL cause cumulative thermal damage and overheating eventually resulting in YLOD condition.
I hear someone shouting "but you can rotate the emblem and they put little rubber feet on the hard-drive end so the engineers must have wanted it to be used that way" .

Everyone who thinks that is true fits in the group that can be described by the phrase "but they were all of them deceived!" . Sony themselves has made the emblem on the new units non-rotatable as a hint that these consoles are to be used when laying flat on a smooth surface (don't lay directly on carpet as carpets are dirty and doing so interferes with the airflow) .

What is the evidence you wonder? Firstly, in every case the thermal paste had run down and out the bottom of the gap between the cpu/gpu and the heatsink. Each time one of these units is powered up or down while standing on end the thermal expansion/contraction "pumps" the thermal paste down and out of that gap eventually leaving an air gap that insulates the heatsink and stops the cooling almost entirely.

On the older "Fat" units the liquid heat-pump tubing caused a secondary issue. Understand that in any sealed container with liquid inside room must be left for the expansion of that liquid that occurs when heated (called "ullage space"). This means the liquid will run down and the empty space will rise to the top when placed vertically resulting in another "air-gap" that will not transfer heat in the area that the "top" of the tubes mounts against the finned area of the heatsink. The Slim and later models got rid of this part of the failure by eliminating the heat-pump tubes and using solid aluminum heatsink with fins pressed directly onto the aluminum.

Once the airgaps are fully developed the cpu/gpu gets hotter and hotter until the solder "gluing" them to the surface of the motherboard melts. Unlike in a PC, there is no mechanically secured socket holding the cpu in place, so they start to slide down the surface. When the alignment is finally lost 'viola! you have achieved YLOD.

So what is the "foot" end of the console good for you ask? Only one answer... Storage. Do feel free to store your console on end when powered off, but ALWAYS lay it flat before powering on and during use. This will eliminate most if not all occurences of YLOD!

[arcadekidflo]

on end and lay it flat

Which is horizontal and which is vertical ?Some people here are not native english speakers

[KillerBug]

That is good news...I guess all those YLOD'd systems that were sitting horizontally are now magically cured?

The Slim and later models got rid of this part of the failure by eliminating the heat-pump tubes and using solid aluminum heatsink with fins pressed directly onto the aluminum.

My slim has the copper tubes...and my phat does not.

The chips have thermal sensors in them that control the fan. The fact is that if the chips are overheating, the fan should increase speed. Since almost all YLODs happen on systems where the fan never got anywhere close to full speed, you can't blame hardware for the failure, you can only blame the firmware that refuses to turn up the fan speed when needed.

It is a bit like all the people that are angry because Sony used unleaded solder...the solder isn't a problem in systems with properly designed thermal controls...my media server is all ROHS, and that thing has been kicking for almost 5 years with no issues.

You are blaming a side-effect of the symptom when the cause of the symptom is right in front of you.

[edit]
---------- = Horizontal

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| = vertical
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[CaptainCPS-X]

Thanks for this info @sxbarnes

SeeYa!
^^

[pbanj]

got to love one post wonders, who think they know all, the thermal paste is not going to runout the edge from standing up its a paste not a liquid, hell if that was the case then everyone's pcs would overheat from the paste running out as the cpu is vertical,

also you shouldn't put them on a carpet but not because of dirt that is just stupid, the carpet insulates the system and doesn't allow for heat to escape has nothing to do with the carpet being dirty or clean

[fahadsul3man]

OHHHHHHHHHHH SO THATS Y IT IS RECOMMENDED TO PUT THEM HORIZENTAL ....ANYWAY GREAT JOB sxbarnes

[CaptainCPS-X]

Originally Posted by pbanj got to love one post wonders, who think they know all, the thermal paste is not going to runout the edge from standing up its a paste not a liquid, hell if that was the case then everyone's pcs would overheat from the paste running out as the cpu is vertical, also you shouldn't put them on a carpet but not because of dirt that is just stupid, the carpet insulates the system and doesn't allow for heat to escape has nothing to do with the carpet being dirty or clean

It's always good to have different opinions ^^, Thanks!. So far I don't have any experience with YLOD.

SeeYa!
^^

[Señor_Striatum]

While I do not think you have found the root cause of YLOD, you have raised some interesting observations. Seeing how BOTH horizontal and vertically positioned PS3’s suffer from YLOD it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between position of ps3 and occurrence of YLOD. You got me wondering about the fluid in the copper tubing, I don’t think Sony would or did go out of their way to improve it if this were the case because, just as KillerBug said, the tubing exists in both models. I never place my ps3 vertically but I cannot imagine how the thermal paste would ooze out of the heatsink and the CELL/RSX gap either.

[KillerBug]

It would have to be some really crummy thermal compound to just drip out like that...almost all non-laptop PCs have the processor vertical, and you never hear about this problem, even after 10 or more years...the thermal compound may dry up and stop working, but it doesn't drip out.

BTW...has anyone actually cut these tubes open to see if there is liquid in there? Not all thermal pipes use liquid. I remember when we first started to see these pipes in high-end heatsinks for PC overclocking, and we saw pipes with liquid and with gas...and the gas ones seemed to work just as well.

[RainMan]

Originally Posted by sxbarnes Unlike in a PC, there is no mechanically secured socket holding the cpu in place, so they start to slide down the surface.

So you're saying it's the chip sliding out of place, not board flex separating the chip from the socket like previously reported by millions of people who have spent billions on this to find exactly what the answer is? Sorry, but I don't agree with anything you've said at all.

Like killerbug said, the paste is more likely to dry up and burn to the heatsink/chip before it would ever liquify enough to drip out. Any that has seeped out is not because of overheating....it's because they put too much paste on the chip and it seeps out when they press the heatsink down to the chip during assembly.