I wouldn't be posting this but this was out of the ordinary. Last night I was playing Uncharted 2 and the fan was extremely loud. I did the vacuum cleaning of the vents. And still when I play this game the fan starts cranking up after a min or two. It's loud enough that I can't even drown out the noise with the volume from the TV. It's even louder than my computer's fan (and it's pretty loud itself). This is the first time I've seen this happen to my PS3. Oddly enough when I turn the game off and I'm at the XMB, the fan slows down after a minute and becomes silent. By the way this is a 40GB PS3 (the one released in Oct 2007, I purchased it in May 08).
Now I've been doing some reading but I want your opinions as to how to what could be happening and how I can prevent damage to my PS3. I am NOT going to do the PS3 fan test. I am thinking the thermal paste is not doing its job, hence the PS3 fan is going in overdrive right now when a game is played. But this is just a theory, and I have no way to really diagnose any further so I ask for help here.
On a side note, if necessary, I am comfortable opening up the PS3 as I've built my own computer in the past and have dealt with hardware issues multiple times.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, I applied the 3.30 update for the PS3. I did this only to keep the PS3 up to date and did not play games on it until a week later (which was yesterday). I'm not sure if this is an issue people are experiencing with the update and/or this particular game. But figured I'd throw it out there too.
