These devices provide good reasons, as to why ball grid array surface mounting graphics chips with early lead free solder, was a cheap … but very bad idea.

the majority of failure associated with these machines can be attributed to this design decision, graphics processors just like cpus get very hot, as such they need attatching to the graphics card in the same way as the cpu itself, ie into a slot onto the graphics board using pins on the graphics processor die itself, the same as a cpu would be, as this is the only way to reduce the failure rate of the bga sfm package design, in such intense thermal environments as current consoles and laptop motherboards, especially under the loads that these devices may find themselves, also I doubt the aging issues with thermal paste , is a an acceptable thermal contact design solution long term, under heavy load, for devices that are not designed to be user serviceable.

My brothers fatboy playstation 3 lifespan 2years 3 months.
not acceptable for any electronic product made with resources from earths limited supply.

Sonys solution :

£130.00 for someone elses refurbed fatboy ps3 with a 3 month warranty > wow thats faith in your own manufacturing an refurbing skills 3 months for £120.00 ! so a ps3 is so reliable that sony themselves will only guarantee its functioning, if you pay the equivalent of £40.00 monthly.

PS3 slims are no doubt much more reliable as the nanometer design of the chips has been reduced, thereby scaling down temperature based failures also.

Also cooling within such designs should be about being thoroughly effective in the worse load/use scenario, ie running 24/7 not presuming 4 hours use per day, or some other subjective presumption.