PlayStation®3 General Discussion

[Tinnyalla]

The fan test is fine, think about it... The fan running at full speed for 20/30 seconds removing dust from the console. Apart from maybe the fan breaking (unlikely) there's really no negative effects of the fan test.

I would really love to hear from all the 'fan test haters' what they think the problem with this is.

btw, that instruction manual didn't state anywhere that the fan test was bad

[DesertRaven]

Sounds like the 'hold down disc eject' puts the PS3 temporarily into a 'hardware default' state i.e., no firmware running . This causes the DVD drive to automatically eject and the fan to default to it's safe mode which is full-speed (better to provide more cooling than needed than not enough).

This is why it makes the beep beep beep and LED flashes red because it’s not running as a PS3 at that point, just a set of independent hardware components.
I’ve seen a lot of suggestions for using compressed air to blow dust out – bad idea. This is likely to blow some dust out but most will just get blown deeper into the heat sink and equally all over the other internal components such as the Blu-Ray player lens etc. As Sony says, much better to gently suck the dust out regularly before it builds up.

If the PS3 within a few moments of turning it on goes to 100% fan speed it either means the temperature sensor is faulty or the thermal connection between the CPU/GPU and the heat sink is poor i.e., they’re heating up but unable to transfer the heat to the heat sink.