Help with PS3 thermal paste

Hi all. Think I might have goofed up changing the thermal paste on my 80gb E01. PS3 ran good prior to changing thermal paste. After I did it, it runs quietly and plays games great but will shut off during gaming and give me the blinking red light. Never did this before until I changed the thermal paste.

During the process, I managed to scratch the RSX chip. There are 3 good scratches on the top left hand of the chip. Would this cause the PS3 to abruptly shut off during gaming. I mostly play cod games which IMO don't really work the PS3 that hard. Fan speed is 3 when playing so I don't think its overheating.

It will shut off about an hour or two into playing. Once it shuts off, I can restart it immediately and it will work as if nothing happened. The only thing I can think off that I did wrong was scratch the RSX chip, otherwise everything went smoothly. When taking the fan/heatsinks off I did have to wiggle and work it to get it off, maybe I dislodged the solder joints on the chips? But wouldn't that result in failure immediately?

Any help would be awesome!

I have pictures, but gamespot will not let me post them as this is my first post.

Did you remove the IHS? Pointless bothering if you didn't.

Scratching anything is bad. How did you reseat the spreaders? A thin spread of permatex ultra black or similar on the spreaders would be ideal.

@Random_Matt: I did not remove the IHS as I don't trust myself doing that. I used Arctic MX4 and put a pea sized (probably a little more) on the center of each chip. I then put the heatsink/fan assembly back on and seen that it made contact with both chips and reassembled everything. I'm thinking I might tear it apart tomorrow and look over everything and redo it.

@girlusocrazy: I didn't touch the cell or RSX chip, but I did run my finger across the heatsinks a little bit. Would that be enough to compromise the thermal paste? Hoping it's not anything serious like a connection or a crack in the solder.

@girlusocrazy: Ribbons were reconnected properly. I'm going to rebuild the database and see if that does anything. If not, I will tear into it tomorrow and redo it.

If it's a PS3 that's backwards compatible with PS2 games, then I wouldn't play ANY ps3 games on it. Go get a slim or a Super Slim to do that with.

Your phat ps3 will last longer just playing ps1 and ps2 games on it

So i need to clean my unit and re apply thermal paste to my ps3. I have never done that before. Any tips as i dont want to add too much or too little and hopefully keep it alive a bit longer.

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