Yea so far they are doing me right... Especially being that my system was bough tin april and i NEVER activated the warrenty or anything, nore did i buy an extended warrenty.. I dont have my receipt or anything. They didn't need it.. no questions asked. They are paying for everything.. BUT.....
If you go to
Xbox.com | Xbox.com Home and go to the forums and check out the hardware section, you will see the MS is really Fukcing people. They are sending refurb'd systems back to people. In some cases they just send other peoples broken rigs to a new person w/o fixing it etc.. Im really bummed after reading how most people were delt with.. Fortunately, i only have good things to say about their customer care so far...
On a side note, can you guys believe that MS is having almost a 12% failure rate with the 3 red blinking lights?!?!? (hardware failure). The 3 red lights dont really effect me b/c im not getting ANY lights or errors at all, but still.. That failure rate is just way too high....
You can all laugh if you want, but a lot of these; "my xbox started freezing then a few weeks later i got the three red lights of death" might be overheating caused by coupling of 2 things. one is dust, the other are updates that push these rigs too hard.
I know you probally think dust cant do anything, but with my DTR (desktop replacment ) i have to clean out my CPU and GPU every other month. Dust is very fine. And after a wile of building up it can drop air flow (which is the only means of cooling for the Xbox) by up to 85%. On top of that, if this dust gets ANYWHERE near the actual chips/thermal compund , it could seriously render its performance..As far as the temperature defferences go... My GPU @ idle would be around 60C, under load about 100C. After i open it up, blast out the dust and re-apply AS5 to the GPU core and memory the idle temps drop to about 45C and load is around 75-80C.
This has to be done every other month in my old-***, dusty house. You'de be amazed at how much dust/fur i remove from my laptop. I'de love to open up my Xbox and blow out the dust and re-apply AS5 to the chips, but that voids my warrenty....
I'm going to the store now to buy a can of compressed air.. Ill see if i cant blow out some dust.
Another reason these things might be overheating was pointed out by another on the other site..
Quote:
he GPU package contains two separate silicon dies: the GPU proper and a daughter-die containing 10Mb eDRAM along with FSAA and post-processing functionality.
This GPU setup shares 1 Heat-sink for Both dies, which means that the Daughter-Die (10mb edram (( memory)) will reach temperatures close to what the GPU is heating up to. Even though in my opinion memory would never reach a high temperature like this on its own.
Taking a closer look into the system and around the main board its apparent that it was built quickly as the solder joints are somewhat of poor to fair quality. There were solder drippings on the casings of a few capacitors so much for quality control. But the question is Can poor solder joints cause a hardware failure? yes it can but here is where things can get a little more confusing and where others may disagree. There's no doubt that poor solder connections are part of the reason that some 360s fail. However in the case of these updates pushing the 360 to fail within days even though it is related to poor solder joints in most cases, These updates are the direct cause of premature failure.
Before i go into about what i think is actually causing the failures from these updates, in-order for some of you to understand the reason behind it, Its important to also address how some others including myself were able to fix there system after getting this 3-red light hardware failure. The fact that some of us were able to bring our systems back to life again (and mine works great now, knock on wood) Tells you 2 things, 1- The updates in most are not bugged or defective to the point where it destroys the 360 due to its programming as I and others have yelled in the past and out of anger and not really taking the time to think about it. The fact is that YES after the update the systems went down, but we have to also take into account that in most cases including mine , the system worked for a few days before the system failed. And after bringing the system back to life the system works fine without issues. If it was bad programming then I hate to say it but just about every 360 would have failed immeditatly and the system would not be recoverable. 2- Now that we can confirm that the updates coding are not the real cause of the failures we have to look at the hardware which in this case brings us back to the GPU.
These system updates are continually pushing the system harder and faster so we can get more from our systems , its a great thing however I believe the problem is with the manufacturing and not the updates. And now i will explain why, This latest update addressed the Video (GPU) most people would agree that there system seems to be faster then it was before. This is because as time goes by better drivers etc, start to open up the real power of the system and along with this comes heat because the chips etc are working harder. Unfortunately in my opinion the manufacturing of the system is poor and its showing as more & more of systems just cant handle the load. So what does this have to do with the updates and failures (3 red lights)? Manufacturing is the key here and the reason some 360s work flawless and others fail. In this case the GPU was tweaked and is running hotter, In my opinion these latest set of failures are being cause by several manufacture errors:
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Long story short; its bad soldering jobs + Heatsinks not being effectivly located + hardware updates keep pushing these systems harder and harder without adequate cooling + possible dust build-up = DEATH to the xbox..
Whatcha guys think?
Gaming Admin. PM 
