Day: July 31, 2026

Building A Reproduction PlayStation Motherboard

July 31, 2026 by 2 Comments

Thanks to things like spilled drinks, leaky batteries, and the general ravages of time, older consoles can be tough to keep going. In particular, excessive damage to a motherboard can make repair difficult or near-impossible to execute even if the rest of the console is in otherwise passable condition. Now, there may be greater hope for those looking to resurrect the worst-treated PlayStations out there, thanks to a new open-source motherboard from [xyzz].

The board is up on GitHub with a CC0-1.0 license. It’s aiming to be a drop-in replacement for the stock motherboard, on to which you would transplant all the necessary proprietary hardware from an existing donor board. The list of transplant parts is quite extensive as you’d expect, including the CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, BIOS, sound chips, mechanical control chip, crystals, and all the ports, among others. Some generic parts can still be had off the shelf, but you could also transplant them if so desired. There are some headaches with the current design—namely, it doesn’t fit perfectly with the lid switch connector, and some of the footprints are hard to solder. Still, it’s a great start, and early testing shows that it’s already quite functional.

Fortunately the original PlayStation didn’t have any sort of battery on board to leak all over the place and corrode things, but boards still get damaged in a variety of other un-fun ways. Thus, it’s great to have a potential replacement motherboard on offer to bring badly-damaged machines back to life.

We’ve featured other great restoration projects in this vein before, too, like the efforts to recreate the C64 motherboard from a few years ago. As ever, enthusiasts are doing great work to keep these classic machines alive long into the future.

Thanks to [ToolThatIsTom] for the tip.

Using The Chimney Effect To Drop Passively Cooled PC Temperatures

July 31, 2026 by 9 Comments

The stack effect — also known as the chimney effect — is the basic principle that hot air not only rises, but if guided through a tube, the rising hot air will create more pressure that will effectively draw air more effectively into the tube. This is not only great for a chimney, but also a useful principle if you seek to cool something like a PC in a more passive manner. The main question is of course how much of a ‘chimney’ you need to see real effects for something like a typical water-cooled CPU’s radiator, as demonstrated by [der8auer] in a recent video.

Although there’s a lot of fun physics behind the stack effect that you can run the numbers on, the more practical demonstration here using 3D printed funnel segments for the radiator and various thermometers provides a very hands-on feeling for what you can expect from this approach.

With just a single segment stacked there is already a clearly noticeable temperature change, with the second segment creating a draft as visualized by the smoke machine. After this he goes for broke with the full stack and a resulting 19°C temperature drop on the CPU. While impressive, at this point the required funnel gets a bit silly, though the same principle has been applied to computer cases before, including the passively-cooled Power Mac G4 Cube and the 90-degrees-rotated SilverStone Raven series of cases, like the RV02.

The basic idea of making use of the fact that hot air rises, and maybe also banking on the stack effect for some free passive cooling, clearly isn’t so crazy.

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