Req: PS3 cooling 101

gadgetzilla · Post by **gadgetzilla** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 7:43 am

Hey Folks,

Can someone please provide some info about the PS3's cooling ?

Recently, while watching a Blu-Ray DVD, around the midpoint of the movie, I heard a loud roaring noise, come to find out, it was coming from the PS3. Seems like the fan inside was about to take off. My PS3 is stored horizontally in a open area, on top of a shelf. I cannot change its sitting orientation so it could be sitting vertically.

On the PS3, I'd like to know where are the air intakes, and where does the unit exhausts the air ?

Reason I ask is that while I noticed a lot of hot air being exhausted from the back side of the unit, I saw some pics on the web which let me to believe the air is also exhausted from the right side of the unit as well though I felt no hot air coming out from that direction.

Ultimately, I'm interested in rigging up some sort of a cooling process to the PS3. I prefer not to use the built in USB port to draw any power from it. I have a very quiet small, 4 1/2" AC fan, if I could utilize that, it would be great.

Thanks !

Arfa · Post by **Arfa** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 5:10 am

I've read that raising a horizontal PS3 up slightly by placing it on some small blocks/feet can help things. Although vertical placement tends to be better in general due to the vents on the side being more effective when pointing upwards.

Bear in mind though, there has been many iterations of the PS3 with different fans and CPU's, which perform very different thermally and acoustically. Also there have been many reports of particularly noisy instances, where the fans ramp up and never come back down when the load drops again.

Geeky1 · Post by **Geeky1** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 10:51 am

If you're willing to spend some money and take the unit apart, Koolance sells a set of waterblocks for the PS3...
http://www.koolance.com/water-cooling/p ... uct_id=557

Gojira-X · Post by **Gojira-X** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 1:42 pm

Perhaps this link with pictures of a PS3 taken appart may help?

Metaluna · Post by **Metaluna** » Fri Nov 07, 2008 2:01 pm

Wow, given the prices on those Koolance kits, it probably wouldn't be that much more expensive to wait a bit and buy the next revision of the PS3 (with the GPU die shrink). That one should produce a lot less heat.

Arfa · Post by **Arfa** » Sun Nov 09, 2008 6:15 am

Metaluna wrote:Wow, given the prices on those Koolance kits, it probably wouldn't be that much more expensive to wait a bit and buy the next revision of the PS3 (with the GPU die shrink). That one should produce a lot less heat.

Depends on what you use your PS3 for. Yes, if its just games and blu-ray. no if you like PS2 emulation with upscaled playback and SACD playback.