Hello,
so my old PS4 (Gen 1, I think, not a huge console person, it’s my Bloodborne machine and nothing else) has an issue: it turns off after about 5 minutes of it being on, and when it reboots, it goes to safe mode, does some scans, boots and it happens again within 5 minutes.
At first I thought it was a heating issue or the old HDD breaking down, so I cleaned it thoroughly and replaced HDD with a new SSD. Issue did not go away, so in the name of troubleshooting, I blew cold air into it while it was on, but the exact same thing happened again. Have also reinstalled the OS clean when I swapped to the SSD, didn’t do any cloning shenanigans.
Currently my theory is either the main board or PSU that’s broken. One other idea I had was that the thermal compound has gone bad on CPU/GPU, but haven’t tried replacing that yet, it seemed unlikely to be the issue after I increased the cooling temporarily, should have at least seen an increase in the time it stayed on by my logic.
I have another PS4 I found for free on second hand market app, seller said the PSU broke and is missing, but main board should work fine.
I’ve been googling this every once in a while, but haven’t found any clear answers. I also took some measurements from the connectors, and they seem to give correct voltages, but haven’t checked current, and haven’t done any long term measurement when it shuts down, so no clue if it’s a voltage spike or undervoltage that causes this issue. My oscilloscope is also out of commision, so that complicates any long term measurements.
Does this kind of issue ring a bell for everyone? Any further troubleshooting tips? Should I just plug the PSU into the other PS4 without a PSU and see if the same thing happens? Doesn’t 100% rule out the mainboard being the issue, since I have no idea if the mainboard is a known good component on the spare part one either…
I’d really like to finish my Bloodborne perfectionist run some day :)
Oh, this sounds like exactly what’s happening! On iFixit of all places, I’m embarrassed. I’m a huge fan, but never occurred to me to check their guides…
From what I can tell from googling what the hell reballing my APU means, I gather it’s not something you can generally do yourself. Although, since it’s solder joints that have come loose or bad, ye olde glitching GFX towel-oven trick could work as well. If all else fails, I’ll consider trying that.
But this also tells me, that if my spare parts PS4 main board works, I can just swap it over and it should work.
Thank you, no clue why I didn’t find that guide with my previous googling!
I would swap the power supply over to the new board before doing anything like a towel fix (generally those don’t last long term and risk damaging other parts of the system). It is possible to do reball yourself but it’s some of the most advanced soldering you can do. This video shows a similar process around the 18min mark(the chip in this case is a PS5 ssd controller) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pJSheZ6A8Qo&t=671s&pp=2AGfBZACAQ%3D%3D
Yeah, I think I’m gonna go for the full mainboard swap over that kind of soldering job. I’m not exactly new when it comes to soldering, but I don’t think I can manage components of that scale with my shaky old man hands.
I did mean the towel trick as the last hail mary pass idea if all else fails, I’ve only done it once myself with my old 970 that started bluescreening all of a sudden. It did live for another 2 years after that, I would call it a success. Not typical getting that much, I’m aware.
I’ll have a go with the PSU swap and let’s see how it goes. Cheers for the advice!