PS5 stuck at restore and than no power for some time

[groomit]

Hi there,
Tried to condense the problem in the title. Hope it was appealing for someone.

I bought a broken PS5 with 2 sek. BLOD. When it arrived I noticed the bad condition of the console housing, bent cooler pipes and deformed disk drive. Yeah , obviously very bad drop damage. And obviously not appropriately described in the offer. Because it was my first hand on a PS5 for an okayish price, I decided to take the risk.
It is an EDM-020 CFI-1116A.

First thing I noticed was wrong initialization amperage. It went to 450 mA an then dropped to around 150 mA. Figured it was the WiFi chip, that was kind of shorted. After replacing it, amps were correct (300 to 9). But still 2 sec blod.

Second thing I found was a non initializing RAM chip. I figured this using a thermal cam on boot. Reflowing wasn't successful but reballing did the trick.
Finally the console booted into safe mode. When trying to restore the console I got an error translating to disk drive not recognized.

So I disassembled this as well. No obvious damage. But hooks on the data cable from MB were quite worn. So first I resoldered some suspicious connector pins on the BD PCB and then carefully aligned the data cable.

Now I'm at the stage were the console boots into safe mode. When trying to restore the FW, it stops at "1 sec remaining" on download. It doesn't react to controller input or power button presses at this stage. Kind of stuck. When I try to hard reset by pulling the AC-cable, the console appears to be completely dead. No beep, no light. After some time.it again boots into safe mode, stuck at the same time on restoring and than ... Dead. Reproducible behavior.

So this brings me to your immense knowledge. I highly suspect a bad solder joint on the south bridge, which looses contact when the board is at a certain temperature. Do you support this assumption or do you have a different suggestion?

Would love to see this device come alive again :-).

[Mommotexx]

Would probably suspect SSD or SSD controller, but hard to say.
There are ways to read the Southbridge error codes, haven't done it myself yet, but there are some videos about it, and TheCod3r have a website where you can search for the UART codes, maybe your problem has been diagnosed there.

Could also be bad solder joints under the APU, as you also had bad solder joint under one of the ram chip.

[groomit]

Would probably suspect SSD or SSD controller, but hard to say.
There are ways to read the Southbridge error codes, haven't done it myself yet, but there are some videos about it, and TheCod3r have a website where you can search for the UART codes, maybe your problem has been diagnosed there.

Could also be bad solder joints under the APU, as you also had bad solder joint under one of the ram chip.

Thanks for your suggestion. In the meantime I reballed the South bridge. Now the console is stuck at a pulsing blue light.
I read the error codes from the uart interface:

80000140: APU Freeze (No Response) - GDDR6 Data Line Issue (Replace)

So either RAM or APU. Applying pressure to each IC and APU during boot did not solve the issue. Judging by thermal cam all RAM ICs are heating equally.
So how to find the culprit? Don't have spares at hand. :-/
Think I'll have to reball all of them.

[TheWizard]

Groomit,
Were you able to resolve this? I had the same symptoms and upon using thermal camera. RAM module 6 was not lighting up. I reballed but no change. Replaced with NEW known good module but no change. UART shows the same error code "80000140: APU Freeze (No Response) - GDDR6 Data Line Issue (Replace)

Just wanted to see if you got any futher? Thank you.

[groomit]

Unfortunately not. After reballing every ram IC and finally the apu I get a different Error regarding a short somewhere. Need to investigate this. Hopefully I don't have to reball the apu again :-D

[TheWizard]

Please keep me posted. I don't have a BGA Rework station to reball and reseat the APU so I didn't go that far. But our issues we are having seem to be the same. I would be curious where you land this one. Good luck!