My Problem
My 7-8 years old PS3 60GB one of the first gen models, decided to go YLOD on me out of clear blue one day. It wasn't even a long playing session or anything, it was not turned on for a couple of days, then i turned it on didn't even launch a game, i fooled around with videos and photos for 30 mins all of a sudden, it turned itself out with beeps, later which i found was the Yellow Light of Death. I didn't even see it as a yellow light. After a couple of hours of internet crawling, i came up with a plan.
My Fix
Living in Turkey, i did not want to take it to some repair shop here. I would feel like having a kidney transplant in a basement by a rouge surgeon. Again living in Turkey, you would also need luck to find very good quality thermal paste, cleaning fluids like isop. alcohol let alone thermal cleaning solutions, i decided to get the YLOD fix kit from iFixit, even though mine wouldn't have a heatgun since they couldn't it ship it outside US.
I got a much better heat gun elsewhere, watching many videos about BGA reballing and similar stuff, i applied the YLOD guide on iFixit.
To my surprise i must admit, it worked!! I'll back my HDD up while i have the chance now and then see how long it will last.
My Advice
I used an infrared thermometer to monitor mainboard heat and chip heat all the time. Since i had a different heat gun, i had to choose an operating temperature. I used 120 to warm up for 2-3 minutes, then 200 from distance to get the board to 50-60 degrees celsius. Then 300 for heating chip directly above it for 25 seconds.
On Step 16 of the guide, the AC inlet, my PS3 did have the ground cable running under the power supply mounting extension. It runs through a gap between the power supply screw extension and the mainboard chassis, which is smaller then the ground cable strap, so you can't take it out in this step. You have to either take out the power supply first, or, loosen the power supply rear screws and flex it up a little bit to pull the cord from under.
I guess cleaning of chip surfaces which had old thermal pads on and their corresponding spots on the MB chassis, is as much important as cleaning the CPU/GPU chips. Guide mentions nothing about those.
The blue-ray ribbon cable has a 90 bend on it, and it is not symmetrical. Since these are delicate connectors, trial and error methods are not very appreciated here, so at step 29-motherboard be sure which end of the cable goes in to MB for a better reassembly. Better yet, remove the ribbon cable from the MB and leave the other end on the blueray drive at the step 9.
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