PS3 Bumps or BGA

[Nostars240]

Hi, I've bought a CECHC04 PS3 with YLOD and it had 3034. I've done poor man special and heat gunned motherboard and in the process it warped a bit. To my surprise, it booted fine and worked as if nothing has happened. Then I was undervolting both CPU and GPU and in the process it crashed with artifacts on the screen. After that, every time when I boot it, it works, but if I tap slightly on the NEC/Tokins it artifacts and crashes. I'm not sure if it's bumps or BGA, since this behavior occurs with console assembled and doesn't depend on the temperature. SYSCON doesn't report any errors and console has YLOD'ed yet.
(EDIT) After some more playing around, its behavior is different between cold boot and when it's warm. When it's cold, it's easier to get artifacts, but when it warmed up, I had to press a little bit harder to make it artifact.

(UPDATE) I've left the console to play a DVD and it artifacted after ~1 hour into the movie. Even though it had artifacts, after ejecting the disk, XMB was still working and I turned the console off. I tried turning it back on and got GLOD. Then I left it for some time to cool down and now it artifacts every time I boot it. I'm still not sure if it's a BGA or bumps, it seems the only way is Frankensteining it, but it's an interesting case of half dead/alive console with strange problem.

 

[Chmielu77]

I would suspect a BGA issue here. Based on this sentence:​

its behavior is different between cold boot and when it's warm

When temperature increases, chip and balls slightly expands and this can cause differences. If the the board is wrapped after heatgun special this can improve broken BGA connections to the point it works, but is like holding two wires, not solid and very fragile connection. Also, the fact that after applying pressure artifacts appear makes me confident that you have classic BGA failure. Maybe console was dropped or poorly treated during shipping. When I see artifacts on console with 90nm RSX, I just replace RSX with 65/40nm one. No need to think about it too much in my opinion, 90nm will die either way. It can be a CELL BGA failure, but this chip is difficult to be reballed. For me, in early phat models RSX is a starting point.
I hope this will help you a little with your mystery ​

 

[Nostars240]

I would suspect a BGA issue here. Based on this sentence:​

When temperature increases, chip and balls slightly expands and this can cause differences. If the the board is wrapped after heatgun special this can improve broken BGA connections to the point it works, but is like holding two wires, not solid and very fragile connection. Also, the fact that after applying pressure artifacts appear makes me confident that you have classic BGA failure. Maybe console was dropped or poorly treated during shipping. When I see artifacts on console with 90nm RSX, I just replace RSX with 65/40nm one. No need to think about it too much in my opinion, 90nm will die either way. It can be a CELL BGA failure, but this chip is difficult to be reballed. For me, in early phat models RSX is a starting point.
I hope this will help you a little with your mystery ​

Thank you for your response. Right now, console is inoperable, but I have a donor board with 65nm GPU, so frankenstein mod could be possible in the near future. Funny enough, console was dropped and had 3034 and ~48 days of use. I guess a RSX didn't die by itself, but rather from a big drop as it has a big dent on the console's shell. I guess mystery solved, one of the few PS3 BC with BGA problem.