I took this photo at the Geneva Motor Show in 2012 - G looking on approvingly at the Riceburner.
Last year I reclaimed a proper family heirloom, a launch-era fat PS3 80GB that had been mine back in the mid-2000s. It had done the rounds: me → brother → nephew → spare-room dust, complete with a decent stack of games, several half-broken DualShocks, and one very absent power cable.
Then GT7 came along and woke something up. Suddenly the only machine that could play every single Gran Turismo from 1 through 6 in one place felt essential. Call it completist tendencies, call it a neurodivergent collecting streak? Either way, the old girl was coming home for a fresh lease of life.
The SSD swap and first impressions
First job: drop in a spare 500GB SSD I had lying around. Surprisingly painless once I worked out the transfer process (God bless Badger, my trusted LLM friend, for compressing a decade of forum knowledge into one coherent afternoon).
This thing is SO BIG it dominates my blog post as much as my living room.
Booted her up and… Christ, this thing is loud. Did we really live with that fan racket back in the day? Then I plugged her into the Sonos surround via HDMI and stuck a CD in. Portishead, Perfecto Fluoro, Gomez, it sounded glorious. Proper, rich, analogue warmth that streaming never quite manages. The fan noise? Well, it’s part of the authentic retro experience. (I keep telling myself that.)
GT6 and the patch marathon
Next came the big one: installing GT6 and every single patch it ever received. That turned into a slow, slightly maddening weekend of carefully ordered downloads. Again, Badger earned his keep. Once it was finally running it felt fantastic… until it didn’t. Halfway through sessions it would just shut down. No yellow light of death, so not the classic failure mode. Overheating maybe?
Teardown with an eight-year-old
One very excited techy eight-year-old son later, we had the thing in pieces on the kitchen table. Pulled the Syscon logs. The culprit? The TOKIN capacitors, those notorious little buggers that fail on the fat models and cause all sorts of grief.
I don’t have a micro-soldering station, so after some searching I found Matt at Rarethingz. The man is basically the Messiah of PS3 resurrection. Nervously packed her off to darkest Wales. She came back flawless :-) no more random shutdowns, plus a brand-new CMOS battery thrown in for free. Bravo, Welsh Soldering Jesus.
The British summer strikes back
Everything was going swimmingly until the heatwave hit. Proper British summer, windows open, fan on… and during a heavy GTA Vice City session (Uni Digs revival nights, mercifully minus the bongs and Two Dogs this time) she started shutting down again. FMFL.
Another Syscon check. Overheating. With the TOKINs now out of the picture, there was nothing left to mask the real problem. We were staring down the barrel of a proper YLOD. Quick call to Matt. Diagnosis: the bloody RSX GPU.
Current state of play
So here we are. Cinder-ella (named, with love, for her habit of dramatically overheating and shutting down) is currently winging her way back to Wales for the full Frankenstein treatment, a proper 40nm GPU replacement. I’ve packed her like a newborn for the journey.
I’m quietly hopeful she returns reborn as the Phoenix: quieter(ish), stable, and ready for many more late-night GT sessions without the theatrical exits. The collecting itch is still there, the technical curiosity is still there, and the sheer bloody-minded determination to get this twenty-year-old machine running properly is definitely still there.
Wish me luck. And perhaps a small lottery win to cover the ongoing resurrection costs.
Watch this space, I’ll update when she’s back and (hopefully) stable. In the meantime, anyone else still running fat PS3s in 2026? Any horror stories or miracle fixes I should know about? Let me know!