Microsoft Insider Details Xbox 360 Red Ring Problems 415
kylemonger writes "A blogger at the Seattle PI has interviewed a Microsoft insider about the Xbox 360 project. The insider purports to have the background story on the 'red ring of death' (RROD) failures and why they are so common. 'RROD is caused by anything that fails in the "digital backbone" on the mother board. Also known as a core digital error. CPU, GPU, memory, etc. Bad parts, incompatible parts (timing problems) bad manufacturing process (like solder joints), misapplied heat sinks or thermal interface material, missing parts, broken parts, parts of the wrong value, missed test coverage. Any one or more, on any chip, or many other discrete components, would cause this. And many of the failures were obviously infant mortality, where they work when they leave the factory and fail early in use. The main design flaw was the excessive heat on the GPU warping the mother board around it. This would stress the solder joints on the GPU and any bad joints would then fail in early life. There are also other significantly high failure rates in other areas, like the DVD.'"
Re:Calling Shenanigans... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:2nd time's not the charm (Score:4, Informative)
The Xbox 360 Is Fundamentally Defective (Score:5, Informative)
Xbox 360s were dying in kiosks months to weeks before hitting the shelves in huge numbers.
Xbox 360s were dying at review sites in huge numbers around the time the system hit the shelves.
Xbox 360s have been dying for two years now and there is no sign that Microsoft will ever fix the fundemental design problems of the console.
Each new model is heralded as the one that 'fixed the RRoD problem'. And the failures continue. Each new model comes out and the very day they do owners start posting their RRoD problems.
It is common now for people to have gone through five to six Xbox 360s over the past two years. And people who have had to have their console replaced ten or more times is not rare.
Absolutely pathetic.
Microsoft has forever linked their name and the Xbox label with hardware failure and shoddy design. There never has been anything in the console market in the same league as the Xbox 360 hardware failure fiasco and almost certainly never will be again. No other company in the world has the necessary nexus of unlimited resources and incompetence that Microsoft posses to ever top this sad bit of console history.
exactly what I guessed. (Score:2, Informative)
I grew up as a broadcast brat with dozens of 7-foot racks of nice, hot, red tubes around all the time. the physics never changes. as the temp goes up 10 degrees, the life expectancy of the parts goes down 50 percent. batteries, capacitors, resistors, insulation... semiconductor power output, read your spec sheets. heat kills everything. the use of electrons generates heat. you have to get rid of it. a 10 degree Celsius rise from room temperature puts most equipment at its knife edge. a 20 degree rise is going to be statistically quite significant in early failures.
you don't need an insider, or somebody pretending to be one, to take that to print. somebody decided to rush the product, make it cheap to make, and not do any thermal profiling QC.
voila, mass manufacturing of electro-corpses. ain't the first time. won't be the last. a smart customer will put their hand on a display unit, and if it's too warm, decide to not be an early adopter.
Re:Q: My HDD died MS wants $100 to replace... (Score:2, Informative)
Sorry Charlie, they make you send back JUST the Xbox itself - no cables, power supplies, or hard drives. So the only possible benefit would be the free month of Xbox Live that comes with the repair and the outside chance you received updated hardware for your troubles of forcing a RRoD.
Re:My SNES has pennies in it... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What I don't understand... (Score:5, Informative)
You can use the same principles to build quiet computers- large heatsinks with big, slow fans cool more quietly and more effectively.
Re:2nd time's not the charm (Score:5, Informative)
You are quite right - Logitech have made some nice hardware for Microsoft. The Xbox is not made by Logitech.
Re:cheap repairs (Score:5, Informative)
Take the system apart and remove the xclamps that hold on the heat sinks, clean up the old thermal paste and apply new stuff. After that you insert the screws (they thread right into the heat sink dies) and tighten everything down.
On my system I also had to cut out the little square panel that's under the processors, for some reason it was causing the board to flex and not boot.
There's a thread on how to do all of this located at http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=471958 [xbox-scene.com]
You may save a little money going this way but most of the broken systems I found on Ebay are still about $200, if you want to take a gamble and enjoy working on electronics it's a good option though.
Re:exactly what I guessed. (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting comment, but you really can't sensibly extrapolate one part of a graphics card to "most new consumer hardware". Conductors increase resistance with temperature. Semiconductors sometimes increase resistance at an almost exponential rate and usually have a point where they become full insulators. Electronics that operate at 100C+ is specificly and expensively designed to do so. A big lump of copper and a fan is usually easier. Of course sometimes cases are hot because that is where the heat is getting away - I have a little fanless machine that looks like a BBQ plate and the entire case warms up significantly, which is better than one hot spot of a higher temperature.
Re:exactly what I guessed. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My SNES has pennies in it... (Score:2, Informative)
As a new owner of a 65nm Xbox 360 (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I said problem, it's simply un-acceptably noisy, sure if you're playing Sporty Mc Loud cheer 09 or Explosion masher 12 that's fine but for an RPG or or any adventure style game, ugh!.
I got my PS3 and 360 within a week of each other (good deal here in Australia at the time) and the 360 is almost not being used at all due to the noise, it's just frustratingly loud AND it can't easily be fixed.
The PS3 is quiet for 2 fantastic reasons,
1: the developers can COUNT ON there being a hard disk inside it, so they use it, infact all games install 300 to 1000mb to the hard disk, increasing load times on the repetetive data and dropping laser wear / noise
(not so the 360, thanks 'core' and 'arcade' models... sigh)
2: the data per square inch on the blu ray disks is substantially more, meaning it can spin lower and still deliver data relatively quickly.
I was playing Crackdown the other night and my g/f* called me, so I paused the game, then muted the home theatre system, I'm trying to talk to her but all i can hear is the whirr of a 16x dvd rom spinning at full speed,... big big sighs
I own the premium ffsake Microsoft, FORCE the developers to code in, if there IS a HDD found, to utilize it properly - because right now all i'm hearing is dvd's spin, how that's going to go on the disc spin motor over the years who knows?
While I'm on this topic:
Everyone has likely heard that GTA4 will be better on the 360 due to better game engine code, the PS3 is running it slow (or was?)
Problem is, one thing GTA is RENOWNED for is the constant disc access, chirp chirp chirp on PS2 and Xbox 1, HDD flash on PC - through GTA 3/ VC and SA
Do I really want the disc thrashing about on the 360 version when I could get it for my PS3 and (likely) have the developers utilise the HDD a lot better?
Decisions decisions.
Re:The Xbox 360 Is Fundamentally Defective (Score:3, Informative)
Electrolytics and noise/ripple on the bus (Score:1, Informative)
That puts noise on the bus, and to dumb it down - the static and glitches do lots of unpredictable things.
Not helped by illicit substitutions of the lost price supplier.
I'll be impressed when I see an analysis, that lists by rank, exactly what part fails first.
Same as motherboard issues..