The reason why i insist so much in waiting long times when doing temperature tests is because in the PS3 there is an effect hard to notice, what happens is the heat cummulates slowly in all the parts of the console, and i mean all the parts, along the motherboard metal shields, hdd, bd drive, and even in the plastic parts
You know... when you have been playing for several hours if you place the hand on top of the PS3 you notice is hot.... and for this to happen is needed lot of time (30 minutes or 40 as minimal)
That cummulated heat afects the CELL/RSX temperature... only a bit, but is notable when you are trying to make some precise tests
In one of the tests i use to do it can be seen very well... you need to boot the PS3 (from ambient), and enter in irisman (and inside the fan settings screen) as faster as posible
If you do it very fast... you are going to see veeeery low values... lets say... CELL/RSX = 35ºC... and fan speed very low
This way you can see very well hot the PS3 does the initial "warm up"
In the first 10 or 15 minutes the temperatures increases lets say... 1ºC every 1 minute
In the next 10 minutes the temperature increases slower... lets say... 1ºC every 2 minutes
And the next 10 minutes the temperature continues increasing !... lets say... 1ºC every 5 minutes
At that point (after 30 or 40 minutes idle inside irisman) most probably you are bored about the test, lol (like me) so you are going to be tempted to stop the test
But the problem is that shit is still heating up !!! (very slowly, but constantly) so it sucks because if you are very picy like me you would like to know the max temperature under this enviroment (idle inside irisman)
This test is very accurate, if you are doing some modding (or manteinance replacign thermal paste), is very good to do this test because you can repeat it before and after your mod to have a very accurate value of the temperature improvement you achieved with your mod
Another of the things i use to insist is in making the temperature tests starting from ambient (only the serious tests, not needed to do it always)
To achieve this is needed to have the PS3 turned off for several hours to allow all the parts of it to return to ambient temperature
This sucks too, obviouslly... but it just needs some planning, the point is you can prepare everything one day at evening/night and go to sleep... and at the next day you do the test inmediatly (and as faster as posible) in the first boot of the PS3
This kind of tests im mentioning inside a homebrew (irisman) are going to give you very stable tempreature and speeds values, because the workload of a homebrew is always the same, specially because we are idle looking at the tempreature and fan speeds values
Inside a game is way harder to find a point where temperature is very stable... i used to make some inside the game "the evil within" by locking myself inside one of that small rooms where are located the savepoints... but is not good enouoght in most of the cases because the game is loading the map and enviroment out of the room (but you cant see what is happening outside of the room)
This depends a lot of the kind of game... in the last of us i felt lucky to find 2 points where the enviroment is very calmly but the temperature have a extreme heat peak, and that peak is mantained constantly (so technically is not a peak), this is very rare as far i could find, in most of the games that "teperature peaks" decreases fast (in the same way the tempreature increases fast, it decreases very fast too)
Anyway... i been talking about 2 different tempreature tests
If you do it inside a homebrew (like irisman) your goal is to find a point where the tempreature is veeeeeery stable... the purpose of this tests is to allow yourself to make comparisons (before and after changing something)... so the temperature value doesnt matters
The other tests inside games could be considered "stress tests"... here the goal is to find a point of the game where appears that "temperature peaks" that increases heat to max... and the challenge is to find some way to make appears the most "temperature peaks" posibles and repeatedlly... what we need is to find the worst conditions posibles and try to overheat the PS3 by playing
@blckbear_ you could repeat the tempreature tests for curiosity sake as you mentioned covering the hole, but personally i think is not needed because the values you mentioned are around the same i got when removing the plastic top cover of the PS3
Without the plastic top cover the tempreature decreases around 5ºC or so (rought numbers, maybe a bit more i dont really remember the exact number)
Overall removing the top plastic cover entirelly is the same than doing a hole
