Take Apart Your PS3 Slim — in 6 Easy Steps

Welcome to the RapidRepair PS3 Slim take-apart repair guide. Here we show (in nearly sickening detail) the internals of the new PS3 Slim and how to safely reach them in a few easy steps.

You can visit Rapid Repair for the original guide and for more step-by-step guides to fixing your electronic devices here.

Tools required: phillips screw driver, exacto razor, T-8 star driver.

Gather all neccesary tools and place your Sony PS3 Slim on a clean, flat surface. Use a soft cloth or towel to place under it.

Very similar to the full size PS3, the slim has the same feel but is much lighter, has a matte finish, and consumes less power.

Dual Shock 3 contoller

Power cord

RCA cord

USB Controller Cable

Manual and other literature

Blu-Ray demo disc

Turn the Slim PS3 over so we can expose the screws under the rubber feet.

iPhone 3G S Warranty VoidedWARRANTY ALERT: Removing the warranty sticker to get to the screw will void your Sony warranty. Beware!

There are 8 screws that need to be removed at this point. Use the razor to remove the rubber feet, and expose all of the screws.

The larger red rectangle is the blue screw securing the 120GB hard drive. As with the older units, Sony made this user replaceable so you are able to upgrade your hard drive without voiding the warranty.

After removing most of the screws, go ahead and take out the 120GB Toshiba drive using the metal pull tab.

After all the screws from the bottom are removed, you can easily lift the top of the unit open to expose the internals.

This redesigned unit is approx 30% smaller in size and packs a serious media punch.

Sony managed to cram all the components in a smaller shell, to say the least, we are impressed!

View with the top cover removed. Removal of some easy cables can be done at this time.

There are two cables to remove from the power supply, and one cable going to the Blu-Ray drive.

Remove the 2 screws on each side of the power supply, then lift the power supply out to expose more cables.

In this step remove the 3 drive cables to get them out of the way. Feel free to remove the antenna wires for wireless access and bluetooth at this time (2x) Black/White.

Remove the fan cable.

There is a phillips screw holding each of the antenna modules in place, remove them.

Slip the power wires (black and white wires) through the hook in the plastic casing to remove the 120v power input module.

One screw should be removed from the back of the Blu-Ray drive now. The front button panel should easily come up when lifting the Blu-Ray drive up and out. Remove both from the unit. Sony decided to change this panel from a touch sensitive version to an actual push button layout.

Fan removal is easy, two phillips screws hold it on. Lift the fan out and set it to the side.

Remove two phillips screws by the hard drive bay. Three more black phillips screws hold the metal shroud in place, remove them as well.

Removal of the main board shroud requires 11 screws to be extracted. After all of these screws have been removed, easily pull the shroud up. The larger four black screws and the brackets under them hold the heat sinks in place.

Very gently and slowly pull the main circuit board up and off of the other half of the shroud, and heat sinks. There will be excess thermal paste on the heatsinks, which will make this more difficult than you might expect. You will need to re-apply this paste when you put the PS3 back together. Always be gently when exposing and handling critical circuitry such as this.

Take a look at the differences between the old board (left) and slim board (right).

Slim Model:

Following speculation that a ‘slim’ model was in the pipeline Sony officially announced the PS3 CECH-2000 on August 18, 2009 at the Sony Gamescom press conference.

The PS3 slim (officially called the PS3 CECH-2000) will feature an upgradeable 120GB hard drive and is 33% smaller, 36% lighter, and consumes 34% less power than previous models.

The cooling system has been redesigned and Cell processor has moved to a 45nm manufacturing process. The PS3 slim will also include support for BRAVIA Sync allowing control of the console over HDMI and will run quieter than previous models but no longer has the ability to install third party operating systems such as Linux.

FCC filings also reveal a second slim model, the 250GB CECH-2000B.

System Board: Up Close

Cell processor and RSX chip up close.

The PS3 uses the Sony, Toshiba, IBM designed Cell microprocessor as its CPU, which is made up of one 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based “Power Processing Element” (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The eighth SPE is disabled to improve chip yields. Only six of the seven SPEs are accessible to developers as the seventh SPE is reserved by the console’s operating system. Graphics processing is handled by the NVIDIA RSX ‘Reality Synthesizer’, which can output resolutions from 480i/576i SD up to 1080p HD. The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX.

It was rumored that the Cell processors in the third-generation PS3s (40 GB) would move from a 90 nm process to the newer 65 nm process, which SCEI CEO Kaz Hirai later confirmed, and later to 45 nm. This change lowers the power consumption of the console and makes it less expensive to produce.

So? the original ones are 90nm, the newer ones are 65, and the slim is 45nm.

The slim does not contain the emotion engine chip, and no emotion engine emulation, so there is no PS2 backward compatibility.