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I am currently playing The Last of Us on my PS3 Slim and have been running into various technical troubles.

The first being the infamous auto-save bug, the second being the game loading forever (I don't even get as far as the Main Menu), the third being the PS3 no longer loading anything ingame, effectively halting any and all progress until I reboot the game, and the fourth being my PS3 crashing, whenever I try to access the Home menu while I'm still ingame after playing the game for more than half an hour.

The first issue was apparently resolved by Naughty Dog without the need of a patch, and the second was "fixed" by deleting the 1.01 patch and re-installing it.
But what about the third and fourth issues?

Considering the fact, that it is currently summer in the Northern Hemisphere and ambient temperature inside and outside my home is ~30° Celsius, and that my PS3's fan become extremely noisy after 5 minutes after launching The Last of Us, I assume that temperature may be a problematic factor while gaming.

Since I neither have air conditioning nor a fan to cool my room, there is no way I can be certain about the guilt of the summer heat.

tl;dr

Is it safe to play a game as demanding as The Last of Us on a PS3 Slim, when ambient temperature are at 30° Celsius (that is: are the third and fourth issues I encountered, bugs from the game?), or should I wait for things to cool down a bit?

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  • Autosave bug was patched, unrelated to temp in any way. When it "crashes" does the system power light flash red and beep? That's what it does when it overheats. Overheating causes the system to shut itself down, it won't just "not load"
    – Zelda
    Commented Jun 20, 2013 at 16:30
  • @BenBrocka The console doesn't beep, but I'll have to pay better attention to the light's color. If it turns out, it's not the heat, then at least I'll be able to play with my mind at ease :)
    – Nolonar
    Commented Jun 20, 2013 at 16:38
  • If your console is sitting on carpet or in a tightly enclosed space, you should try moving it to increase its air flow so it doesn't heat up as quickly.
    – Brian
    Commented Jun 20, 2013 at 16:53

2 Answers 2

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Yes, it should be ok to play the PS3 in an environment of around 30C. The temperature testing done over at geek.com indicates that the PS3 should operate just fine in an environment upwards of 38 degrees Celsius for periods of at least 84 hours (which is much longer than your 5 minutes).

The summer heat should not be an issue. I'm guessing that the problems are due to an issue with your PS3, or maybe an issue with the game disc.

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  • I see. I'm glad to at least know that the recent crashes aren't because of the heat. Thanks.
    – Nolonar
    Commented Jun 20, 2013 at 20:44
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Generally speaking, as hardware heats up the device compensates by lower cycle frequency which leads to slowdowns, but I'm not sure if that's true in your case.

First, let's get the autosave issue out of the way since as Ben Brocka said, it was patched.

Now, for the slow loading and crashes, there is a common bug where going back to XMB causes PS3 to restart. Nothing to do with heat.

If you're worried about heat causing issues, I would get a can of air duster to clean out inside, namely the fan assembly. Next, keep the device elevated so proper airflow can occur. Do not block any fan intakes or outlets. If the system shuts down and the power light flash red and beep, then you can confirm that heating is an issue. Otherwise, I don't think it's the main reason for the issues you're experiencing.

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