heythatsprettygood
@heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk
- Submitted 11 minutes ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 27 minutes ago:
Ah, I should have made that more clear in the meme. Both NVIDIA and ATI messed up in this era, bad. Sony’s efforts with the Cell are always so fascinating - so much potential is in that (just look at the late PS3 era games), but they just could not get it to the point of supplanting the GPU.
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 29 minutes ago:
If it’s a reflow, your PS3 is running on borrowed time. A reflow heats up the chip enough that parts of it expand enough to make the GPU work again temporarily (the solder bumps on the bottom of the silicon attaching it to the interposer line up their cracks again), but eventually you’ll be back to square one. The real fix is to replace the 90nm GPU with a later 65 or 45nm variant that has the fixed design (search up “PS3 frankenstein mod” for more). There is thermal paste both under and above the IHS - the one under for taking the heat from the silicon up to the IHS, then the top layer for taking it to the heatsink. Here’s an image of a delidded RSX and Cell to show (apologies for the quality, was the best one I could easily find). Image
PS3s did cook themselves, but not to the extent of the 360.
It is funny to see how there are probably so many misdiagnosed 360s out there with bad power supplies that have been subjected to being bolt modded (shudder) or something. It doesn’t help that the three red lights just mean “general hardware fault” without doing the button combination to get further information. I guess at least more helpful than the PS3, whose diagnostics were only made available recently due to a key being cracked.
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 1 hour ago:
Your description of the Starlet is more accurate, yes. However, its heat output consequently caused some of the issues with the ATI designed parts of the Hollywood, as it exacerbated the thermal issues the 90nm variants had, and that a better designed chip would have been able to handle.
The PS3’s IHS was not the problem. There was decent contact and heat transfer, maybe not as perfect as it could have been (there’s thermal paste instead of it being soldered into place, which is why a delid and relid is fairly essential if you have a working 90nm PS3 due to aging thermal paste), but definitely not big enough of a problem for a properly designed chip to cook itself at the operating temperatures of the PS3 (75-80 temperature target on the RSX on an early variant at full load). The Cell B.E. next to the RSX that uses more power (consequently outputs more heat) has a similar setup for its IHS, but IBM did not make the same design mistakes as NVIDIA, and so we see very few reports of the CPU cooking itself even in those early PS3s.
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 4 hours ago:
Those leather jackets won’t buy themselves!
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 11 hours ago:
Agreed, thermals were increasing faster than most manufacturers could handle. Only real exceptions in this time I can think of were IBM (because they had to, PowerPC G5 was such a power hog it pissed off Apple enough for them to switch architectures) and Intel (because they also had to, Pentium 4 was a disaster).
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 11 hours ago:
Wii was mostly okay, but boards with a 90nm Hollywood GPU are somewhat more likely to fail than later 65nm Hollywood-A boards (so RVL-CPU-40 boards and later), especially if you leave WiiConnect24 on as it keeps the Starlet ARM chip inside active even in fan off standby - most 90nm consoles will be okay due to low operating temperatures, but some (especially as thermal paste ages and dust builds) are more likely to die due to bumpgate related problems.
PS3s did crap out with yellow lights of death, although not as spectacularly as 360 red rings (lower proportion due to beefier cooling and different design making the flaws less immediately obvious, but still a problem). NVIDIA on the RSX made the same mistakes as ATI on the Xenos - poor underfill and bump choice that could not withstand the thermal cycles, which should have been caught (NVIDIA and bumpgate is a whole wild story in and of itself though, considering it plagued their desktop and mobile chips). The Cell CPU on there is very reliable though, even though it drew more power and consequently output more heat - it was just the GPU that could not take the heat.
360s mostly red ringed due to faulty GPUs, see previous comments about the PS3 RSX. ATI had a responsibility to choose the right materials, design, and packaging partner to ship to Microsoft for final assembly, and so they must take some responsibility (they also, like NVIDIA, had troubles with their other products at this time, leading to high failure rates of devices like the early MacBook Pros). However, it is unknown if they are fully to blame, as it is unknown who made the call for the final package design.
- Submitted 18 hours ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 18 hours ago:
Yeah, pricing is not the greatest at the moment, most likely because there’s no reference card to keep other prices in check. Still (at least here in the UK) they are still well below the stratospheric NVIDIA prices for a 5070 Ti and are easily available.
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 18 hours ago:
AMD have been amazing lately. 9070 XT makes buying most other cards in that price range pointless, especially with NVIDIA’s melting connectors being genuine hazards. ATI (who were dissolved in 2010 after being bought out by AMD) and NVIDIA in the mid to late 2000s however were dumpster fires in their own ways.
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 20 hours ago:
Oh, NVIDIA have always been a shitstorm. From making defective PS3 GPUs (the subject of this meme) to the constant hell that is their Linux drivers to melting power connectors, I am astounded anyone trusts them to do anything.
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 21 hours ago:
It’s hard to say for certain whose final call it was to do this underfill (it’s a tossup between ATI’s design engineers and the packaging partner they chose ), but at the end of the day it is ATI’s responsibility to validate the chip and ensure its reliability before shipping it off to Microsoft.
- Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent 23 hours ago:
As far as I am aware, the 360 GPUs had faulty solder connections (due to poor underfill choice by ATI that couldn’t withstand the temperature) between the chips and the interposer, not the interposer and the board, shown by the fact that a lot of red ring 360s show eDRAM errors (i.e. can’t communicate to the module on the same interposer, ruling out poor board connections). Microsoft even admitted this in a documentary they made (link), where they said it wasn’t the board balls, it was the GPU to interposer balls. A similar underfill choice is also why there are slightly higher failure rates of early Wiis, although nowhere near as bad as 360 due to the low power of the GPU on there.
- Submitted 1 day ago to [deleted] | 29 comments
- Comment on WHERE ARE MY PRECISION SCREWDRIVERS 1 day ago:
Holy shit, someone who does it as well! Torx bits are so useful for this, I have a fairly high success rate even on the tiny terrible electronics screws I usually work on.
- Comment on This entire community 1 day ago:
This is why you make your own memes. Fresh from the farm- I mean image editor, and with far less compression artifacts.
- Comment on WHERE ARE MY PRECISION SCREWDRIVERS 1 day ago:
Torx needs to become the standard for screws. They are just better in every way.
- Submitted 6 days ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 1 comment
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 1 comment
- Comment on The PS3's comeback was insane 1 week ago:
If you’re interested, RIP Felix did a pretty good video on YouTube about the YLOD failures. TL:DW is most early models have defective GPUs, plus the ones that survived now have aging capacitors, but there’s tools now to find the exact cause from the system controller (SYSCON). A GPU swap is pretty involved though, so needs a skilled technician to pull it off. Still, if you have one of those early backwards compatible models, having it repaired isn’t that bad of an idea nowadays since those consoles are only getting rarer.
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on The PS3's comeback was insane 1 week ago:
The PS3 is in competition with the original Xbox One for being the most undercooked and overpriced launch of a game console. I guess it’s what made the recovery even more astounding.
- Comment on The PS3's comeback was insane 1 week ago:
I guess they had to remove backwards compatibility at some point considering the solution was to shove an entire PS2 CPU and GPU onto the motherboard, massively driving up the already stratospheric production cost that they lost money on even with the high launch prices. Still, it is unfortunate it went away, as it ensured that PS2 games would play perfectly and as intended on PS3 with a proper HDMI output too. Plus, since it went away early, it means all the models with backwards compatibility have the defective GPUs that can cause a yellow light of death. A PS3 Slim with PS2 compatibility would have been amazing. I agree so much with XMB being peak UI design as well, almost every console following has in my opinion a worse UI, other than maybe the Switch, but that’s because the Switch barely has much beyond a game selector.
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 28 comments
- Comment on Nintendo community at the moment 1 week ago:
Ah, I meant the current Nintendo store system. Anyone buying it from Nintendo of Europe can pre order it now as long as they have an active Switch Online subscription.
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 1 comment
- Comment on Nintendo community at the moment 1 week ago:
People who have both another platform and a Switch: confused screaming
- Comment on What's up, selfhosters? It's selfhosting Sunday again! 1 week ago:
Today I learned that for some reason some DNS servers don’t like SRV records, so had to troubleshoot it when people were unable to log onto my Minecraft server that is on a non-default port.
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 11 comments
