I need some advice/reassurance.

[Blade]

Thing is, I'm looking to buy a PS3 at a reasonable price, but the problem is reliability.

My last PS3 (fat model) died of an overheated motherboard (I've had it reflowed by professionals TWICE but it died again anyway, so I decided to sell it for parts/bury it).

Certainly there are the Slim models, which I first considered but....

Now I'm hearing that they still overheat, that there's problems with display, that there's problems with disc reading, disc ejecting, that there's problems with the power supply. And just above and beyond all that my confidence in Sony products doesn't feel so great when I stare at the lists of broken consoles on Ebay.

But I have PS3 games I still want to play, darn it! I still have games I own I want to beat or even play! I have a hard drive that I bought especially for my PS3 and it's sitting there unused.

What I want to know is...what the heck happened? My PS2 outlasted my PS3 console by over 2 years! My PSP has had a longer life.

I'm really not sure any more what PS3 console to get. My confidence is really shaken.

So what do I do?

[Udderdude]

It can't be worse than the 360.

Yeah, not exactly helping much, am I? D:

[ChuChu Flamingo]

I would not get the newest slim ps3 (the one with the flip cover that loads cds manually)

The biggest problem with PS3's is the thermal paste they put on the GPU/CPU dries up in less than two years. After the thermal paste dries up it starts to heat the gpu/cpu bga solder. Over time this cracks the lead free BGA solder from thermal expansion due to heating and cooling which the lead free solder cannot tolerate.

I have a hunch WII U is going to suffer the same problems as 360 due to the X-clamp design. It will take much longer than the 360 to die though, as the WII U uses low power thus less heat.

My recommendation is to get a Slim PS3, and put new thermal paste on the gpu/cpu heatsink + thermal pads on chips. Arctic Silver 5 is what I recommend but it does have a curing time of ~200 hours.

These electronics were definitely not made to last.

[Friendly]

I think CECH-25XX is the best model (third slim revision). No overheating problems at all. CECH-3XXX (4th and final slim revision before the new "super slim") is ok, too, but lacks LEDs in the power/eject buttons and cannot output Blu Ray video via component (only hdmi). You can identify CECH-25XX and CECH-3XXX by the size of their hdds: They are either 160 or 320 GB. Both models are fine, I haven't seen any reports about them failing.

Avoid CECH-200X (first slim model), they tend to get even hotter than 40 GB fats. You can identify the first slim models by their HDD size: 120 or 250 GB.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Thanks for the 411 on the PS3 Slims with the 320GB HDDs. That's great news to hear that they don't have problems in going forward down the road with the thermal paste issue.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~