Inspired by this?
Almost certainly the reference image.
Wasn’t it a problem with the heat sink disconnecting from the processor? If I’m recalling correctly you could fix this by reaffixing it with thermal paste
Ya they’d overheat and warp, breaking the connection and causing the “ring of death”. I bought a few from garage sales in the past, fixed them with a heatgun, and gave them to family and friends.
I find the best idea is just to put an extra fan on them to stop them from getting too hot in the first place. My original 360 still works fine to this day because it never gets the chance to heat up with the extra fan running.
Yeah the cooling on those was bad. The towel trick (I used a stick in the fan) would make it overheat even more, reflowing the solder joints and fixing it
It would not surprise me at all if that ‘flaw’ was by design to sell more units.
The red ring was an extremely costly recall and repair for Microsoft ($1.1 billion) on a console they already sold at a loss to recoup with game sales. It also hurt the brand image, giving the competition a leg up.
In this case the design flaw was from them trying to skimp as much as possible on the cooling solution to reduce how much loss each console sale would bring.
Huh TIL. Strange that they didn’t fix the issue with the 360 slims, because they got pretty hot quick too. I guess maybe they didn’t realize how bad it was until later.
Apparently the S model was more resilient to the solder joints breaking, but still had a somewhat inadequate cooling solution. That article goes into more detail, which basically comes down to Microsoft tried to save money by doing all the design in-house, and ended up botching the whole thing, under testing it, and doing last minute changes (like the addition of a Hard Drive, which modified the airflow negatively, so they put some extra holes in it, but ultimately said “fuck it, ship it out”.
There’s a ton of old rumors and “fixes” but it was recently confirmed by Microsoft that the main issue was failure of the flip chip interposer connections caused by incorrectly engineered underfill epoxy on early batches of GPUs. This is the same issue behind Nvidia’s Bumpgate and likely the PS3 YLODs.
BGA solder balls, x-clamps, thermal paste, overheating, etc were never actually a real issue. Heat gunning/towel tricking the console just warped chips enough that they temporarily made contact and would work for a little while. Only permanent fix is to replace the GPU with one made after they changed underfill epoxies.
Now that these consoles are 20+ years old there’s also aging caps and whatnot to worry about too.
Yep, thats the ‘you’re completely fucked, most likely’, 3RR.
Back when this was happening… me and my boss were in charge of making the support/phone service center node system actually make sense.
You got a whole giant mess of flows from stated problems and how questions get answered…
And you have to make it actually make sense, make it actually identify and solve problems, reorient the flows, tease out infinite repeating loops, write new nodes and flows.
And of course, half of the people in engineering and half of the managers of support call centers are lying to you, to cover their asses.
… just thinking about it makes me ache for a cigarette.
Fun fact!
MSFT would have done better finacially if they literally just sold everyone 2 of the original 360s, instead of one.
That would have been less expensive than the costs of diagnosing and ‘repairing’ them.
And, yes, sometimes, you’d just get a new 360 with your original hardrive swapped into it or transferred into it…
… and sometimes they’d forget to reregister whatever the new hardware id is with your account, resulting in you getting auto banned when you got the replacement and turned on Xbox Live.
Yep. That did happen at least a few times.
This painting brought to you by 11 cans of Modelo Lite
A truly haunting piece
The raw sadness of it
Unforgettable experience. My brother worked at big retailer at the time, and he said basically all of the first batch of Xboxes 360 got returned
Dude’s living in a closet at the end of the road, somehow still close to campus. Fuckin red rings are a sign of life lol
Do the YLOD next. Lol
Relevant
