Cheshire UK
Member
Hello to the psx-place community!
I've been troubleshooting a few consoles lately and came across some interesting errors (1701/1601), which led me to the excellent threads here, especially the one with a lot of input from @Rip Felix:
The Console Overview
I'm working on a CECH-L03 with the VER-001 motherboard. It's a "fat" model, and it was clear right away that it had been opened before. The console was missing a hard drive, but when I powered it on, it displayed the "missing boot device" message and the fan was running at what sounded like full speed. This immediately suggested a delid might be necessary.
After adding a hard drive and installing the latest official firmware, I checked the error logs. Surprisingly, they were mostly clean, with only a single 1200 error, which often points to a thermal issue. This made sense given how loud the fan was.
I opened the console and found an excessive amount of thermal paste. I decided to proceed with a delid on both the CELL and RSX chips. The delid went smoothly, and after re-pasting everything with a basic thermal compound for testing, I put it back together. The console powered on, I installed custom firmware, and it ran perfectly for about 5 hours while playing titles like The Last of Us.
Confident the console was stable, I performed a deep clean, washing the plastic parts and disassembling and deep cleaning the Blu-ray drive.
The First Attempt at Capacitor Replacement
Before reassembling everything for the final time, I wanted to replace the NEC Tokin capacitors. Upon inspection, some of the CELL capacitors showed brown, burnt-looking signs.
My stock of new capacitors was limited. I had:
The Unexpected Failure
When I turned the console on, it seemed fine initially. I inserted a copy of The Last of Us to test the BD drive, and that's when things went wrong. The console suddenly shut down, gave three beeps, and the red light started flashing. After a couple of tries, it YLODed.
Checking the SYSCON logs revealed a series of alarming errors:
This made me suspicious, especially after reading the second thread mentioned above.
I thought, could the capacitors be the problem?
I decided to replace some of the 8 used eN8 capacitors on the RSX side with a mix of the other 470uF caps I had. The new configuration was:
A Puzzling Question(s)
The big question is: Did the specific capacitors I used on the RSX really cause these errors, or was this just a strange coincidence? It's possible the BGA is failing and the capacitor swap just happened to occur at the same time.
One thing to note is that the eN8 capacitors have a much higher ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance) than the others (12 to 25, if I recall correctly). I'm not sure if this could have caused the issues I saw.
I'd really appreciate some opinions and insights from the community.
Thanks,
M
======
Update 1
Hey everyone,
Just a quick update on some more follow-up tests I've been running.
I removed the used 470uF capacitors, leaving only 4 new 470uF and 4 used 330uF caps.
The total capacitance is now 3,200uF, which was a bit under the recommended 4,000uF for the RSX power line. I was expecting SYSCON errors due to an unstable power line, but to my surprise, the console ran flawlessly! No freezes, no shutdowns, no glitches—I even played The Last of Us without any issues.
Next, I reinstalled the other used 330uF capacitors , thinking they might have been the source of my earlier problems. Again, I fired up TLoU and ran it for a while, and still no issues.
This makes me believe the original 1802, 1701, 1601 errors, and after few power on attempts, the subsequents 40xx and 3034 errors that appeared immediately after turning on the console, were just a coincidence and unrelated to the capacitors.
It seems thar for now, the issue "disappeared" on its own, but I'm now fairly certain that to get this console truly reliable, a reballing or reflow would be necessary.
The temporary stability is likely an illusion and the points raised on other threads stands (in particular the first one cited at the beging of this thread).
Cheers,
M
Update 2
Here we have it (24/Aug/25).
It did frozen again during tests (playing a PS3 game) and the SYSCON logs has:
M
I've been troubleshooting a few consoles lately and came across some interesting errors (1701/1601), which led me to the excellent threads here, especially the one with a lot of input from @Rip Felix:
- Fault finding YLOD with the SYSCON - First steps and Error reporting
- ps3 fat syscon errors diagnostic
The Console Overview
I'm working on a CECH-L03 with the VER-001 motherboard. It's a "fat" model, and it was clear right away that it had been opened before. The console was missing a hard drive, but when I powered it on, it displayed the "missing boot device" message and the fan was running at what sounded like full speed. This immediately suggested a delid might be necessary.
After adding a hard drive and installing the latest official firmware, I checked the error logs. Surprisingly, they were mostly clean, with only a single 1200 error, which often points to a thermal issue. This made sense given how loud the fan was.
I opened the console and found an excessive amount of thermal paste. I decided to proceed with a delid on both the CELL and RSX chips. The delid went smoothly, and after re-pasting everything with a basic thermal compound for testing, I put it back together. The console powered on, I installed custom firmware, and it ran perfectly for about 5 hours while playing titles like The Last of Us.
Confident the console was stable, I performed a deep clean, washing the plastic parts and disassembling and deep cleaning the Blu-ray drive.
The First Attempt at Capacitor Replacement
Before reassembling everything for the final time, I wanted to replace the NEC Tokin capacitors. Upon inspection, some of the CELL capacitors showed brown, burnt-looking signs.
My stock of new capacitors was limited. I had:
- 12 new AlPol EEFLX0E471R4
- 4 new TaPol 2R5TPE470M7
- eN8 (Yageo/KEMET 330uF TaPol)
- eS8 (Yageo/KEMET 470uF TaPol)
- 470 e71F (NIC 470uF TaPol)
- CELL: 12 new EEFLX0E471R4
- RSX: 4 new 2R5TPE470M7 and 8 used eN8 (330uF)
The Unexpected Failure
When I turned the console on, it seemed fine initially. I inserted a copy of The Last of Us to test the BD drive, and that's when things went wrong. The console suddenly shut down, gave three beeps, and the red light started flashing. After a couple of tries, it YLODed.
Checking the SYSCON logs revealed a series of alarming errors:
- 801802
- 801701
- 801601
- 404402
- 403034
This made me suspicious, especially after reading the second thread mentioned above.
I thought, could the capacitors be the problem?
I decided to replace some of the 8 used eN8 capacitors on the RSX side with a mix of the other 470uF caps I had. The new configuration was:
- CELL: 12 new EEFLX0E471R4
- RSX: 4 new 2R5TPE470M7, 4 used eN8, 2 used eS8, and 2 used 470 e71F
A Puzzling Question(s)
The big question is: Did the specific capacitors I used on the RSX really cause these errors, or was this just a strange coincidence? It's possible the BGA is failing and the capacitor swap just happened to occur at the same time.
One thing to note is that the eN8 capacitors have a much higher ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance) than the others (12 to 25, if I recall correctly). I'm not sure if this could have caused the issues I saw.
I'd really appreciate some opinions and insights from the community.
Thanks,
M
======
Update 1
Hey everyone,
Just a quick update on some more follow-up tests I've been running.
I removed the used 470uF capacitors, leaving only 4 new 470uF and 4 used 330uF caps.
The total capacitance is now 3,200uF, which was a bit under the recommended 4,000uF for the RSX power line. I was expecting SYSCON errors due to an unstable power line, but to my surprise, the console ran flawlessly! No freezes, no shutdowns, no glitches—I even played The Last of Us without any issues.
Next, I reinstalled the other used 330uF capacitors , thinking they might have been the source of my earlier problems. Again, I fired up TLoU and ran it for a while, and still no issues.
This makes me believe the original 1802, 1701, 1601 errors, and after few power on attempts, the subsequents 40xx and 3034 errors that appeared immediately after turning on the console, were just a coincidence and unrelated to the capacitors.
It seems thar for now, the issue "disappeared" on its own, but I'm now fairly certain that to get this console truly reliable, a reballing or reflow would be necessary.
The temporary stability is likely an illusion and the points raised on other threads stands (in particular the first one cited at the beging of this thread).
Cheers,
M
Update 2
Here we have it (24/Aug/25).
It did frozen again during tests (playing a PS3 game) and the SYSCON logs has:
- 801701
- 801601
M
Last edited:
