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Microsoft Insider Details Xbox 360 Red Ring Problems
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.'"
Because you just know it's going to fail.
At least their diagnostics were comprehensive enough to catch all those failure modes.
... that a common "fix" for RROD 360's is to wrap them in a towel. This causes the bad ROHS solder balls to expand and make better connections.
Even though I just sent in my third XBOX 360 for RROD repair after the great XBOX Live failure of 2007/2008, something about this interview just doesn't seem right. Why would a Microsoft "insider" risk their employment spilling well known issues about the XBOX 360 as "secrets" to a blog very read. That doesn't sound like a good career move.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I also don't think they considered that DVD drives generate heat, so putting and OEM-style DVD unit directly over a low-profile GPU heat sink wasn't too bright. Meanwhile, there's plenty of empty space in the corners of the box. I understand software companies aren't particularly good at making hardware, but really...
As recent as just a month ago in an interview with an Xbox exec and also statements from Bill Gates recently no definitive statement was made that any solution to the Xbox 360 hardware failures had been found and instead focused on what an amazing replacement program they had. That is shocking for a product that has been on the market for more than two years. With all of Microsoft's resources they still haven't been able to demonstrate publicly that a random sampling of whichever is their latest model can be operated with a staggeringly high defect rate.
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.
What sort of things would cause those different parts to fail?
The sun coming up, basically.
Don't they burn them in? When I worked in manufacturing we always burned in newly
manufactured products for 24 to 48 hours. It drastically cuts down on infant mortality problems because only the survivors are shipped.
initial articles about the RROD had quite enough evidence. warm, sometimes hot machine, dead and stayed dead. had it pegged right away as heat not getting out.
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.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
it's called 360 because of the trip it takes
from microsoft, to you, back to microsoft, to you again
http://bash.org/?806949
The insider purports to have the background story on the 'red ring of death' (RROD) failures and why they are so common
What background story? Cheap parts, not enough testing blah blah...Where are the specifics?...and the causes mentioned for RROD were already known ages back.
I have had my 360 since a few months after the lauch and I have never had any RROD problems with it either.
Then again, I'm having good luck with Vista so I guess I'm inversely jinxed.
...in the basement?? preposterous!!
You simply cannot trust a product from Microsoft not to screw up. I seriously doubt any of us Windows users haven't had to reformat at least once (of the Windows users here anyway). I bought a Zune and it was dead in a month. On top of that me and 3 friends got x-box 360's one way or another and 2 of them got the 3 RRODs(I honestly don't use my 360 much, this computer completely blows it away as far as gaming, it can boot 3 different OS's, it allows me to network myself without paying a forced subscription fee, AND it doesn't get hot enough to warp its own motherboard. Beat that Microsoft.)
Is why it's still hot when the fans sound like a 737 revving for takeoff. The PS3 is pretty much silent, has more stuffed into the box, and has a nearly flawless record!
Have you tried playing it?
The very first thought I had when I saw tear down photos of the 360 hardware around the time the console was first released was how idiotic it was to place the DVD drive directly over the GPU, which had a pathetically inadequate heatsink in comparison to the CPU. I am not any sort of engineer, but years of tearing apart and building computers led me to conclude that the particular arrangement of the GPU under the DVD was poorly thought out.
Dude, my SNES has PENNIES rattling around in it and it still plays. There's no excuse for the crap we put up with on these over-priced consoles.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
So yeah, my HDD died and it's gonna cost $100 to replace, is there any way to force a RRoD so they'll fix my xbox under warranty?
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.
A black hole is where God divided by 0
This reminds me of the episode of Venture Brothers where they go to the space station and it has a single red light labeled "Trouble" that blinks when any problem occurs... :)
Not only that, but most hardware issues could be resolved by a) blowing into the cartridge slot or b) into the cartridge itself.
Are you high? Don't buy first-rev hardware, and don't buy add-ons for "next-gen" video formats that are (a.) only marginally better than current-gen offerings and (b.) are in the middle of a format war. Problems solved. The 360, a gaming console, sold itself to the crowds because it has good fucking games.
And while I do know people that are MS-exclusive fans, I honestly have never met anyone who has said-- of virtually any product-- "I will buy a product from any random manufacturer as long as it's not X, Inc." Anyone who's that concerned about who the "Evil Manufacturer" is isn't going to just blindly choose any secondary option, especially not from Microsoft. They're not exactly a "warm fuzzies" megacorp.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
"Digital backbone" and (my favourite) "core digital error". As usual, Microsoft having to come up with their own terminology for what the rest of the real world would refer to as "hardware flaw" or "engineering mistake".
We'd better start calling the RROD the "ruddy halo of definitive binary turkey washout".
Microsoft -- reinventing the wheel... into some kind of odd mix between a rhombus and a Moebius strip.
Yes. A 1000 times yes. This is the second time my xbox failed (on it's way to Texas so sayeth UPS), the 1st time I shipped it away. I'm kind of going through a low grade withdrawl. I stupidly created an unreadable gamertag since I never thought I'd be playing with people who don't know me. Over the year I had my xbox it changed how I entertained myself. I didn't go out drinking as much, going to movies as much, and I watch A LOT less TV. The xbox had nearly killed TV for me entirely, which in the midst of a writers strike is fucking painful. But I had been at the point where I'd play the occasional RPG, but mostly I had a regular game or series of games with people I'd met on xbox live. It's social and relaxed, got it's share of pithy comments (why bother sticking with games filled with asshats when you got people who aren't asshats to play with), but also competative. It's a complete entertainment experience. One I clearly partook of too often, given my symptomatic reaction. But just Gears of War, I've played that for about 500 hours for $60 bucks. Even if you include the price of the console, that's just dominating value. I've considered buying a second "spare" xbox to use in case of repair. And this might be the addiction talking, but with just one Gears of War game a year, it makes a certain twisted economic sense. Then since I was the only guy who had a 360, cause I was the only one of my friends who had an HD tv, my place was something of the cool place to hang out. Now, I'm jittery, posting AC on a laptop, as I sit in the dark. Alone.
Your question boils down to was my life before "400 dollars better" than it is now. Yeah. Easily. Thank god for superbowls and superbowl parties.
I've done it, didn't even need a soldering iron. All you need is some 10-32 x 3/8 and 10-32 x 1/2 machine screws along with some #10 nylon washers. You'll also want some Arctic Silver paste to replace the cheap crap that MS uses on the CPU and GPU.
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
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.
The biggest cause of failures that I've seen on the Xbox commmunity forums is from MS' flawed heat sink clamp design. Take off those damn x-clamps and 90% of the time the system will boot right up without a problem.
Here's a thread with more details, and instructions.
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=595746
So you see the ring and your XBox dies...
There's a movie in there somewhere...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
PS. it's in a under ventilated wood/glass cabinet along with my digital cable box. Ironically the cable box gets hotter. I probably should remove the back to allow better air flow.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I haven't had a single issue with my 360, and I've had it for roughly a year and a half now.
It only gets 3-4 hours of use during the week, and maybe 5-6 more on the weekend, so that might have something to do with it.
You'll know when it happens, all your electronic devices will turn to blue screens.
My condolences.
BGA:s have always been a pain to work with. Ericsson had similar problem during the 90s with some of their mobile phones.
If you think thermal expansion is hard think about the stress introduced in a SMA due to users pressing buttons.
Break the sound barrier - bring the noise.
...coffee machine's got the same problem. almost every day there's a ring of red light flashing and it stops working, but then i refill the water and the RRoD disappears. Maybe you should try this with the Xboxes as well - i'm almost sure that the RRoD will disappear INSTANTLY!
"Fast, cheap, reliable, pick any two" when you go to buy any videogame system.
You mean "Fast, cheap, reliable, Microsoft*, pick any two"
* Microsoft counts as two
I am not stubborn. I am right!
That would only fix problems temporarily, but might cause worse one later since blowing into the cartridges corrodes the contacts a bit due to the moisture from your breath. Never had problems with SNES carts either way. Only the NES been the problematic of the older consoles.
I got RROD a few months back but since I heard microsoft was slow on repairs I contacted a local console mod store. I payed 80, they fixed it and I got it the day after. Even got 1 year warranty on the repair. They makes alot of these repairs and makes a good amount of money from it. Most of their costumers are ones that have no warranty or wants it faster than the weeks it takes for microsoft to fix it.
>> Dude, my SNES has PENNIES rattling around in it and it still plays.
WOW!! First piggy bank case mod! Weren't you supposed to choose an iMac, though?
Windows XP and later reboot instead of show a BSOD when it bugchecks. This can be disabled, but only a small percentage even know about it. Sneaky Microsoft marketing tactic there.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Now I know where that term comes from... it's not crashing computers, it's M$'s ulterior motive - to take over the world!
"it's Pinky, Pinky and the brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain"
I can tell you now that mine, while only a month old doesn't get tooooo hot and hasn't broken,... THE NOISE PROBLEM IS ANNOYING.
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.
I will buy a product from any random manufacturer as long as it's:
Since this is the natural place for living room electronics: neatly installed in some under-TV cabinet, surely it behooves the manufacturer to design their equipment to live where many people are going to instinctively put them?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Manufacturers are still learning how to deal with lead-free solder, and until they do, you can expect your shiny electronic gadgets to turn into bookends and doorstops with grim regularity.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Annually now for two years I had to send mine back in. This last time it started as lock ups, and the support said it wasn't covered under the extended warranty since I didn't have three red lights. Luckily for me the lights came on a few days later. There are only two more years to the extended warranty, and I wonder what will happen after that. The support guy told me 99% of the time they will just give you a new box as they are trying to take all the old ones off the market.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
Microsoft catering to the needs of the user? Come on, everyone knows it works the other way around.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
... that a common "fix" for RROD 360's is to wrap them in a towel. This causes the bad ROHS solder balls to expand and make better connections.
This problem should be known as "XBOX menstruation" with the fix being "tampaxing":
Person1: "Damn my XBOX is now showing the red ring and is refusing to work properly".
Person2: "Have you tried tampaxing?"
Person1: "Eh?"
Person2: "Your XBOX is suffering from XBOX menstration. Tampaxing deals with the flow issues"
Person1: "Thanks, your right tampaxing has fixed the issue!".
Don't know if you will see this or not, but I will respond anyway.
Had I known all of these issues, would I still have bought mine? Absolutely. I love most of the gaming systems that have been put out since the 2600 (and own many of them from many different competing brands as well) and excluding my time spent playing WoW with a bunch of friends for an entire summer, I would say my best gaming experiences have come from the 360. Fantastic games, amazing controller, great graphics...granted, just like every system there are turds that get released for it, but there are more games on the 360 that I consider to be the best games than on any other system.
Overall, out of all the gaming systems I have owned past and present, the 360 is by far my favourite. If mine died tomorrow, I would be buying a new one tomorrow.
Living With a Nerd
I used to get the "red ring of death" from time to time; I thought it was due to overheating, so I moved it somewhere with better ventilation. Turns out it was a problem with the wiring in my house. Apparently the 360's external power supply is _very_ sensitive to brownouts. I've got the power supply in a place where I can see the colored light now - the "red ring of death" doesn't just apply to the XBOX 360 itself :)
I plugged the 360 into my UPS with AVR, and the problem's completely gone. I always thought the AVR stuff they try to push on people buying home theatre equipment was a scam (considering the things can cost $500+ and don't even provide uninterruptible power), but apparently some consumer electronic devices really are anal about line voltage.