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Comment by kraquepype | Hacker News Reader

I got a cheap used original PS4 and it wouldn't power up unless you put pressure on the mainboard, right around the PSU.

I took pieces of wood, and a clamp and applied pressure there and it worked.

The same pressure is applied if you use washers on the heatsink clamp - I did that and it's been running fine for months.

The solder joints on the GPU get brittle under the stress of heat and compressing it restores the connection. Pressure or re-flowing is really just a band-aid, the real fix is to re-ball the GPU but that gets expensive.

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Classic. This was a common failure mode for the 360 as well. Used to fix friends 360s that had the red ring of death by tearing them down, tightening the braces underneath the heat sink, and adding an additional case fan.

Never actually had to escalate to reflowing the BGA mount underneath the GPU but recall tutorials of how to do that in a consumer oven.. thank goodness I never tried that one at home.

The real hack with the 360 with that issue was to wrap it in towels and turn it on so it'd cook and reflow itself. Absolutely bonkers that trick worked for anyone at all, let alone for enough people for it to be a "thing".

I'm kinda amazed soldering is still such a thing.

Tech is already pretty reliable in my experience (At least the cheap stuff that isn't as high power and doesn't thermal cycle as much I guess), but getting rid of solder as a failure mode and making chips swappable would be so cool.

If they could somehow make production grade Z axis tape we could just tape the parts on with a 3d printed frame for position, and anyone could do component level repair without much skill.

And all the chips from dead devices could be reusable, if there was a way to automatically sort them all.

Can you be more specific about the placement? I have a PS4 that sometimes fails to start, it would be neat if I had a consistent fix for it.

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