I have torn down my original PS4 to replace the thermal grease and thermal pads. I read online from various sources that the thermal pads are 1mm in thickness. After I opened up the console I noticed that 4 of the VRAM chips have 2 pads stacked on top of each other.
Is this common?
In PS4 Original mostly you’ve got 2 sets of thermal pads 1 set on top side of the board on VRAM and another set on the bottom side of the board on VRAM.
I haven’t actually seen them stacked and I would rather say they either fell off as they usually do. Or maybe you have misplaced them?
Sometimes in other versions of the console they are placed on different components as well such as Renesas IC (that mostly can be seen in PS4 Slim edition).
About the thickness it is indeed 1mm but I wouldn’t worry as long as you’ve got them on all VRAMs plus it has to make contact between VRAM and shield.
I personally have used the thermal pads from one of my ps4 slim consoles in order to add to customers console.Later I have just simply replaced them with 2mm thermal pads as they were cheaper to get than 1mm and those ones I got are providing similar thermal conductivity performance.
To simply put, don’t worry too much just 1 of each on VRAM will do fine as long as they have contact with the shield.
Thanks for the reply!
I bought this PS4 off of eBay and it was sold not working for parts. When I received the PS4 it was non functional but after a new power supply started working fine. After 10-15 mins of gameplay the fan would get very loud so I pulled it back apart to replace the thermal paste and pads. That’s when I noticed the oddly stacked pads.
On one side of the motherboard the VRAM chips each have one pad per chip, on the other side 3 chips have one pad and 3 chips have two pads. I wasn’t sure if anyone had seen this before, not sure if Sony did this or the previous owner since there were signs that it had been opened before.
At this point I will just replace the thermal pads with one pad for each chip.
I’ll report back if this is a success.
I ended up getting it put back together last night and can confirm that the noise level is drastically reduced. If on a scale from 1 to 10 the fan was at a 10 before it now hovers around a 3. I need to go up to it and mute the TV to hear it now, before it was louder than then TV.
In case anyone is curious I used ‘Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Thermal Paste’ for the APU and ‘Thermalright Extreme Odyssey’ for the thermal pads. I chose these products because of their high thermal conductivity. I also bought the Tronicsfix tool kit which worked out great.