That time a junk PS4 taught me about thermal paste placement

I was picking through a bin at a local electronics recycler in Austin and found a PS4 that someone had tried to fix themselves. The thermal paste was spread in a thick line across the whole chip instead of a pea-sized dot in the middle, and it had actually fried the motherboard. Has anyone else seen weird paste jobs that wrecked a console?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopher_west120d ago

Oh man, that thick line thing is wild. My buddy tried to fix his Xbox One and he did the same thing, just laid a fat strip of paste right down the middle of the CPU. He told me he watched a YouTube video but 'paused it at the wrong part' lol. The paste squished out the sides when he clamped the heatsink on, and it got all over the little resistors near the chip. The console worked for like two days then just black screened. He brought it over for me to look at and there was paste crusted everywhere, shorting out those tiny components. He was so bummed, spent like 20 bucks on a tube of arctic silver too.

the_phoenix20d ago

Buddy of mine did the exact same thing, fried his whole motherboard.