Recently me and colleague of mine get into "saving" console. We bought a a few FAT PS3 with good intention to save them and maybe some resale. 

But we wanted this gem for ourself BC CECHC04.

We have set eye on one Auction and bought one for 60€, good condition of the case, looked good. We have good soldering experience (working for phone repair shop), so we got maybe over optimistic. Expected dead RSX, TOKIN  or short, so we guessed, we would be good. 

But sadly as soon as we dissambled it, we knew, it's done  
... I mean is there even CECHC04 without an external repair? Guess not.This one was fully delided, but someone chipped CELL... Damn it. 

Tried to get more info from  syscon (already soldered pins, so we knew, that someone already did that), but we did solder UART anyway, of course it puts out latest error A0801200, since someone tried to repaste it and get this error, we tried to look through thermal camera and seems like there isn't any heat during startup on Cell or RSX, also reports A0801701, A0801601.

This all unfortunately started for the previous owner with this A0801004 and A0801002, which might just been NEC/TOKIN... 

So man down I guess... Sadly. We tried... I love PS3 console, I've bought Slim as my first console when I started working, that era for me is nostalgic in many ways. I couldn't get FAT version when I was young and living with parents and I would love to have one functional, but seems like it should not supposed to be 😂.

Anyway, just wanted to share the story of dead BC console. If you have a good intent and want to buy one, probably look for one that have not been disassembled before. 😎 

Wanted to save one... CECHC04.