Yet another Phat temperature inquiry
Hello, all.
First of all, I'm sorry for the recycled topic. I know this is posted quite often, but in some ways I think my situation is a bit unique - and I've accumulated some doubts while reading the community's sentiment on YLOD and old CECHX fat models.
I've recently cleaned my Fat model PS3 that I had since it's launch. Yeah, really: I was a kid back then, but my father gave it to me as a Christmas gift after his business trip to JP. It's the CECHA01 (series. It even has the DSD/SACD label on the back!
It has almost 64 days of operation, as per webMAN. I've never ever opened it before last week, and my most intensive gaming days with it were on the last decade (2010-2020). It has never had temperature problems such as emergency shutdowns or YLOD.
After a long time of it tucked away in a cabinet (and after Sony's recent shenanigans), I've decided to go back and service it to play some lost media games that never left the PS3 platform. Therefore, I followed ifixit's guide and disassembled it thoroughly to remove dust and change the thermal paste for CM mastergel, which was what I had laying around after my main PC maintenance. Everything went smoothly, but when I tried to remove the heatsink, well, it came off with the RSX lid stuck under it. I didn't even apply that much force, and it took me awhile and a few looks to the guide to see that my RSX chip was exposed, after I had already done the pastejob. Before noticing, I had already cleaned everything and reapplied thermal paste to the die and the four ICs on the RSX, and to the CELL lid. Fastforward a bit, I jailbroke it using Evilnat and Mr. M guide and everything is running dandy.
After extensive research, however, I learned that the phat older models are very prone to YLOD and began to fear for my machine. I know there is no consensus and symptoms of overheating, but I'd like to ask anyway: is it safe to game on a console this old, with an "accidental delid" and given the temperatures I got with my synthetic and real load tests?
On the tests:
- Thermal Bench: first image, I tested with WebMAN's manual fan control at 43%. Ignore the maximum temps, those were for 37%. After around 40 minutes on full parallel load, it stabilized just shy of 60C on both chips.
- Killzone 2: second image, I tested with the pure SYSCON default profile, as I had seen some people here doing so to ascertain if a CELL needs delid or not (does this make sense?). After 20 min, it stopped at 76C for the CELL and 72C for the RSX.
In summary: Is it safe to run an early Phat PS3 given it stabilizes under 60C with fans at 40%?
As much as I am a pragmatic person (I normally play on PC emulators due to the performance gains), I must cave in for fear of damaging the console. I know that someday it will die, but, well, it has a sentimental value for me since I grew up with it.