Reflow on PS4 - worth bothering?

[spleenharvester]

Yes I know reflows are awful and that I've told others as such - but everywhere near me charges £80+ for reballing and working consoles can be bought for not much more than that.

I basically want to extend the life of my knackered PS4, until I can afford to buy a brand new console in a couple of months. This one (a CUH-1116) was sold to me as having a HDD fault but it actually has infinite BLOD + no disc feed

The washer trick worked straight away, so it is almost certainly an APU fault. Has anyone ever done a reflow on these APUs (I only have a WEP 852D+ heatgun at my disposal) and had it last more than a couple of months? Or should I just keep cramming washers behind the APU and hope and pray?

I know this is a "how long is a piece of string" type question but I'm interested to see people's experiences!

Cheers

[momaka]

Re: Reflow on PS4 - worth bothering?

IIRC, PS4 APU has the equivalent of Radeon HD7770 or something like that. From what I've seen, HD7k series don't give that great results with reflow compared to older stuff like HD6k and older... but still worth a try if nothing else works.

I'm assuming the "washer trick" means just stuffing washers or something else behind the APU to insert stronger clamping pressure on it, which gets it going again. In that case, I think you will get to a point where stuffing more and more washers won't work, and that will come rather quickly now.

So reflow might be a better option. That said, if doing a reflow, don't bother with adding flux. Reason being is that it's not the BGA between the board and the APU that has failed. Rather it's the BGA between the APU substrate and APU silicon core. And since this BGA is flooded with epoxy, there's really no way to properly fix it. You just reflow (reheat) the APU and hope that it works. If it does, consider improving the cooling, as that's very likely a catalyst in the equation of why the APU failed. Radeon HD cards are known to become more problematic once they hit over 50-55C on the core.