PS4 Hardware Problems?

[Able Seacat]

There have been a few reports of problems with the PS4 from people who have managed to get the console early.

A user from Reddit won a prize to get the console early found that "on arrival it would turn on but accompanied by a pulsing blue light (it should glow white) and there was no output signal to the television."

IGN had a similar problem and had tried a "wide variety of methods to correct the issue: new HDMI cables, new inputs, new TV, putting a disc into the system, connecting it to and from the Internet and holding down the power button during boot-up for seven seconds to try to reset things. Nothing worked." They also tried "adding light pressure to the top of console and it briefly flickered a few active home menu images on the television."

The first retail PS4 Kotaku got from Sony didn't work and members of NeoGAF are also echoing problems.

What do you guys think? Hopefully this is just a small hiccup with a few isolated incidents and won't explode to be a squeal of the RROD.

Sources:
IGN
PixelEnemy

UPDATE: The Escapist have their own article on the subject which you can find here.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Maybe those users were just unlucky to get one of the few faulty units. Some failure rate is unavoidable, no matter how well the hardware is built. That goes double for any new machine, so it wouldn't be anything new.

Or maybe the problem goes deeper indeed, in which case I hope Sony and/or retailers will be forthcoming about it and replace/refurbish any bad units at no cost to the customer. Hopefully followed by a quick hardware revision.

I'd hate to see that happen though. While I don't particularly hold any loyalty to Sony, I've always found their products to be pretty reliable.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well do we have to repeat this every single time, consoles at launch will always be bugged out the asshole and if you are paying premium to do their bug-testing that is your mistake to make.

 

[Jamash]

It's not true because Sony can do no wrong&#8482.

Anyone who's "claiming" their PS4 has "problems" is just a paid Micro$oft shill who is peddling NSA lies in an attempt to sabotage the coming of the Messiah and make people switch to the Illuminati Spybone 180.

Remember people, it's Greatness Awaits, not Breakness Awaits.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

I said this same thing when I heard how small it would be. Tightly packing components like that can result in some bad things happening during shipping. I also wouldn't be surprised if the new PS4 has it's own RROD issues due to poor ventilation and overheating. Everything is just too compressed and the heat produced by that hardware is extreme. Graphics card temperatures can reach upwards of 95C(nearly boiling water hot). The problem is that not everything is designed to take that heat, processors in particular can't stand that kind of heat.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

not surprising; you're going to get a few faulty units in a typical launch. Of course this also means that the PS4's launch isn't the coming of Buddha that a lot of people were thinking it was going to be

 

[Sizzle Montyjing]

You're gonna get issues, but the way people have reacted is insane.
Not sure of the exact number, but last I checked it's been less than 10 consoles that have stopped working, and it seems like for different issues as well.
That's a failure rate of less than half a percent, given the 4,400 or so that are already out there.

 

[Itchi_da_killa]

I never buy a console in its first year. I have avoided a lot of problems that way too, and some consoles I end up not buying at all because the problems never go away. Such as the XBOX 360 that I waited on until deciding not to buy it because of the issues it was having. Then i finally bought the PS3 and here I am five years later playing on it still.

 

[Eve Charm]

Buy a warranty so you don't have to worry if there are problems down the line.

 

[sageoftruth]

Well do we have to repeat this every single time, consoles at launch will always be bugged out the asshole and if you are paying premium to do their bug-testing that is your mistake to make.

Agreed. Always happy to have someone else do my bug testing for me.

 

[Vivi22]

I said this same thing when I heard how small it would be. Tightly packing components like that can result in some bad things happening during shipping. I also wouldn't be surprised if the new PS4 has it's own RROD issues due to poor ventilation and overheating. Everything is just too compressed and the heat produced by that hardware is extreme. Graphics card temperatures can reach upwards of 95C(nearly boiling water hot). The problem is that not everything is designed to take that heat, processors in particular can't stand that kind of heat.

I don't know. None of the PS4 hardware is really top of the line. The CPU for instance is built on a low power mobile architecture from AMD, so excessive heat shouldn't be a massive problem, and I expect the same with the GPU since they're integrated on the same chipset. And for what it's worth, after seeing the PS4 opened up in the disassembly video, and as someone who's taken apart a fat PS3 before, things were much less tightly packed and looked to be much better cooled in that thing than the PS3 was. They still stuck the power supply in there which is stupid from a cooling standpoint, but I really doubt the PS4 would have the same issues with airflow you'd get in a PS3 or 360.

Whatever issues these launch PS4's are having right now, I'm not convinced heat is the issue. The temperatures shouldn't be anywhere near as extreme as your typical PC or previous consoles, and the system does look like the air flow and the heat sink are much improved. I suspect something else is going on.

 

[EternallyBored]

Yeah, as others have said, pretty much every console has launch or hardware issues, back when I first got an SNES in 1990, right out of the box, the audio would never work right, had to return it after the first week. Since then I've had either friends, acquaintances or myself experience hardware failures in every single generation. Usually, it's pretty rare though and out of the over 4 thousand systems reportedly delivered only a small fraction are having issues. People don't get on the internet to post "yeah my console is working fine so far" so it's hard to get a good picture of what the failure rates look like at the moment, after the official launch we should be able to tell whether they are serious issues or just standard hardware failure.

People have to remember the RROD was memorable and significant because it was a persistant issue that had the same cause and effected a much larger number of systems than normal. So far, there doesn't seem to be a unifying failure point for these bricked system stories yet, so it sounds like standard defective hardware problems, rather than a systemic singular point of failure like the RROD.

 

[Hero of Lime]

Remember people, it's Greatness Awaits, not Breakness Awaits.

I only laughed for twenty minutes, thank you for that.

OT: If there are a few things console launches have it's a lackluster lineup, lots of hype, and random system failures and glitches. Except for the Gamecube of course, proven(by me somehow) to be the most perfect video game console device known to man.

 

[Eldritch Warlord]

Hopefully we didn't use up all of our calm rationality in this thread. It'd be nice to have some next week when practically identical circumstances are likely to happen.