Chosen Solution
Hey guys and girls. My PS4 recently developed a power issue that I thought was due to a faulty power supply. It would turn off about a second after I turned it on and would show no life until I unplugged it from the main and plugged it back in. Changing the power supply did not help. This evening I tried turning it on because I hadn’t tried to in a while and for the first time I noticed a tiny spark close to the fan. There was also a slight smell of burned electronics. Being the DIY guy that I am, I took it apart to find that a SMD capacitor had ruptured.
Does anyone know the rating of the broken capacitor I’ve highlighted in the photo? The mainboard is the PS4 SAA-001 from the PS4 CUH-1001A model. Your help is highly appreciated. Update (02/17/2021) Hi @honakrisi Thanks for your response. In my spare time today I managed to get the blown capacitor off the board. It just fell away in pieces as soon as I put a pair of tweezers to it. Just as you mentioned, I do see some damage to the adjacent capacitors. I will take your advice and have those replaced as well. You also mentioned damage to the pad below the cap. but I’m not at all sure if it’s the case here. Please take a look at the pics and let me know what you think.
Does it look repairable? On a side note, I wish there was a way of knowing the capacitance without having to remove a good one from the board. Update (02/18/2021) Hey @honakrisi Got you on the pads. I’ll try to get them cleaned up soon and report back on their condition. Thanks a million for going the extra and demonstrating what healthy pads look like. On the board, there are some sections with pads where capacitors would be installed but are left blank. The empty pads are copper color (pictured). Hopefully this is a tiny indication that the pads where the capacitor exploded are still healthy.
Hi @x3remes It is really difficult to tell from these images, because it still has some residual solder on the board, but once you cleaned it up you will be able to tell. I had a scrap PCB lying around so I intentionally damaged some pads and cleaned up the board for your reference. The green markers show healthy pads, that will accept new solder, the red ones are damaged and you may need to use jumper wires or solder bridges to get a good connection.
Once you removed the other two capacitors, you will be able to see the difference in the pad conditions yourself and hopefully that is just corrosion that you need to clean up. I suggest you use a fine solder wick and a light scraping action to clean up the boards. If you have flux, even better, because it removes the oxidation of the copper and helps your solder flow better. If it was just the one failed capacitor that is damaged, you would probably be fine without it (as these are some filter capacitors) but having all 3 damaged, I would definitely replace them all.
Hi @Sanjeev Ballyram Yes, I did get it sorted out and my PS4 ended up working well again. What I did was get a non-working mainboard from which I lifted the capacitors. I used them to replace the ones that got damaged (all 3 in the row) and then powered on the console. It fired right up and now it’s as if nothing happened. I didn’t get the rating of the caps, but I can and inform you if you’re still interested.
