Everyone has heard about the PS3 Tokin recap process, all I can say is that it is painful and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Before

This was not the first time this PS3 has been stripped down to the motherboard. You can see that the CPU and RSX have been delidded and the thermal paste/compound has been replaced. This lasted a little while until it kicked another YLOD about 6 months later. My next point of call was to replace the notorious NEC Tokin caps. All of this was done before this video came out detailing a much better diagnosis process using the SYS_CON reading method.

Desoldering

The desoldering process was not as straight forward as you would think, the PCB is so dense and so many layers a hobbyist soldering setup just can’t put enough heat into it. I ended up using my Reball station to pre-heat the board and then the caps came off fairly easily.

Fixing a mistake and after

Adding the new caps was fairly straight forward. I just followed this guide from PSX-Place.com. One very annoying mistake I made when desoldering was I bumped a couple of the decoupling capacitors for the CPU which I think are 0201 sized which was extremely hard to fix, but I did fix it in the end.

After fixing my mistake the rest was easy, again you need to preheat the board to make it easier to put the new 470uf/6.3V tantalum capacitors back on. I did not leave the original NEC’s on so I had to make the bridging wires to replacing the internal bridging. 

So far so good, the PS3 has been going well rock solid since doing this mod/fix.