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Cooling Modifications for the Memory and Northbrige of the PS3 CECHH01 (40GB) Model

A while back (before I created the first PS3 E-Z Chill) I made some changes to the cooling for the parts other than the CELL and RSX. This isn't really a guide, more of a post log.

This image shows the main reason I did this...I have circled 5 rubbery thermal pads in the image. The four small pads are for the memory and the larger one is for the NorthBridge chip. These pads provide terrible thermal conductivity. Worse, the memory heatsinks were very crummy, and the northbridge was cooled by the protective mainboard plate...not even by a heatsink.

Here is a close-up of the memory chips:

Here are the chips with small heatsinks applied using Arctic Adhesive. These are heatsinks from a Zalmin video card cooler kit, designed for much more themal load than the outdated ram in the PS3 can produce.

Next I added a custom made heatsink to the northbridge chip. This picture also shows the CELL and RSX with Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound applied.

The next issue was the stock ram heatsinks:

I attacked the problem from the back:

After a bit of work, they pulled right off of the shield:

After removing them, the shield was slightly warped. I used a small hammer to flatten it back out:

Next I used a Dremel tool to cut the plate so that it would fit over the new heatsink on the northbridge chip:

After that, it was just a matter of throwing everything back together. Before doing this, I was having some troubles that, if on a PC, would indicate bad memory or a bad northbridge. After these modifications, those problems never came back.