The Truth about the 90nm RSX
Back in 2022, the PS3 community was misinformed regarding the “Bumpgate” issue with certain IC’s and IC manufacturers from the 2000’s. The community was led to believe that TSMC was the manufacturer of the 90nm RSX. TSMC are the fabricator that admitted to having produced IC’s with these issues.
There has been new evidence shed to light in 2024 that anyone but TSMC actually fabricated the 90nm RSX. Therefore displacing their memo confirming that their manufacture process of certain IC’s in the 2000’s had a substrate/bump flaw regarding the 90nm RSX.
This was also including the Xbox 360 GPU, which was actually fabricated with TSMC.
The 90nm RSX data that is retrievable from the Southbridge logging via UART, shows that Fujitsu,Sony and Toshiba are the only manufacturers of the 90nm RSX.
The 65nm RSX had 2 fabricators, Toshiba and Sony.
The 40nm RSX had 3 fabricators, Toshiba,Sony and TSMC
I have been reballing 90nm RSX’s since 2009 and have done 1000’s of them for customers and sales.
The failure rate after a reball over the years has been very little and upon return there has been other issues with the console other than an RSX or BGA issue. The 90nm RSX is just a reliable as the 65’s and 40’s. Although they are getting old now,they tend to wear out quicker and or die from reworking temperatures. Find a healthy 90nm RSX and it will last you years.
I have personally seen SONY Frankenstein modded consoles fail for the same reasons as the 90nm RSX and 65nm RSX’s too. They Frankenstein mod is not immune to BGA failure , especially on the COK-001/002 motherboards.
I have seen slim 40nm consoles fail BGA and need reballing, just like the 90nm RSX. No PS3 is immune to this issue.
A long story short is that no PS3 RSX was manufactured by the company that announced they had substrate/bumps issues with their manufacture process. So you 90nm RSX DOES NOT have faulty substrate or bumps issues!
My belief is that a poor design(rigidity),board size and clamping structure are what leads to common BGA failure on the larger COK motherboards. In saying that All revisions of PS3 motherboard from phat to slim to super slim all do and can have BGA defects and simply need a reball of the IC.
Attached is a spreadsheet of the RSX data logging I have been doing over the past 6-12 months