I’m an extreme novice but I treated the station very gently and followed two tutorials when taking it apart and putting it back together.
It got a new fan due to dust buildup and bad bearings on the old fan. After the initial repair, the station went back to working just as well as before the fan started having issues. Unfortunately, over the past couple days, a week after replacement, I’ve both been receiving the error message when playing high performance games like Red Dead Redemption 2, again and I ended up getting them periodically faster and faster until the point where I cannot turn on Red Dead without the station giving me an error message seconds into gameplay.
I could play low performance games like Madden and use YouTube or sit on the home screen for hours at a time, still. But last night that changed and I got an error message while playing Madden.
I got the fan on Amazon so there is a chance that it’s not moving enough air but with the amount of dust that I had cleared from the system and the external fans that I have used to help cool the system, it should be moving a sufficient amount of air.
The fan came with thermal paste and because the problem got progressively worse… and the problem seem to be dependent upon how complicated the graphics were… I figured it has to be the graphics card and figured the thermal paste was insufficient so I took the system apart and replaced the thermal paste, a pea-sized dot in the dead center of where the graphics card will be placed. But I did not get a longer play time between error messages. I had a week or so before I saw error message after initially fixing it so I don’t think it’s the paste.
I also made sure that the motherboard was flush and correctly in place and that all the screws including the heatsink piece we’re snug without being too tight. Finger tight, no wrist or arm strength. But I did not see an improvement after that attempt at fixing the problem.
My last thoughts are that the PlayStation did heat up to the point of damage at some point and perhaps one of the heat sensors is malfunctioning. I can’t tell you exactly the temperature coming out of the back of my PlayStation but I can tell you hotter air has come out of it in the past so I don’t think I’m getting the error message because of legitimate overheating