My Xbox 360 went through an amazing transformation today. Last night, it was blinking three red lights at me. Yes, it suffered from the dreaded Red Ring of Death. Today, it's gone! No more Red ring of death. Not only that, it has turned black too! Awesome!
I packed up my 360 last night in its original box and headed down to my local Gamestation with the receipt. I politely asked if I could upgrade to the Xbox 360 Elite. They had no problem with that. All I had to do is to pay an extra £20. You see, my receipt stated that my faulty Xbox 360 was worth £300 when I bought it. The Elite at its current price plus a game was worth only £20 more. I happily paid it to get the Xbox Elite and a copy of Ace Combat 6! Sweet deal! There's a slight downside to all this though. I've lost all my game save files.
There are two immediate things that I noticed when I unpacked my xbox elite. The first was that the power brick felt significantly lighter (though I may be wrong). The second is that the ethernet cable provided was much shorter than my other one.
So I guess the question now is, how long will this xbox last? Will I be heading down to Gamestation again in a further 10 months? The answer to these questions will probably depend on whether I got a new type of Xbox codenamed Falcon. The Xbox 360 Falcon uses a 65nm CPU instead of the old 90nm CPU. The advantage of this is that the 65nm CPU is much cooler. However, the red ring of death is usually caused by the GPU overheating and there are a lot of suggestions that the GPU is still a 90nm processor. The Falcon was originally released onto retail shelves back in August 2007 so it is a bit early to say how reliable these Falcons are.
So is my new Xbox Elite a Falcon? I think so but I won't know for sure. The power brick is 175W compared to the 203W power brick of my dead xbox. Also the date of manufacture is in December 2007, at a time when Falcon models should be the only models being produced. I'll certainly report back if my Xbox dies any time soon.
Thursday, 7 February 2008
Red Ring No More
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3 comments:
Well, if it's any consolation, the 360 Elite, whether or not it has the new chipsets, does have a more secure GPU, so that should prevent it from breaking.
My Elite's been running fine for about 10 months or so - and I've been using it as my DVD player and playing games sometimes for hours at a time.
I'd like to see how many hours a day these people who have had multiple RRODs actually play...
For me, I played A LOT! Since I got the xbox, I would say I was playing 3 hours per day on average. Weekdays I played 2-3 hours per day. Weekends I played even more. There were times when I didn't have any new games to play though. During those times, I probably only turned on the xbox twice a week if I were lucky.
I must say, the heat coming out of the back of the new xbox is definitely a lot cooler than my previous one. How is the GPU more secure? All I've heard is that it has a better heatsink?
I'm pretty sure (at least I've read this on a few game sites) that they replaced the thermal paste with actual brackets that prevent the board from warping under the heat (which is what was popping out the GPU). Apparently the paste they were using wasn't able to stand the heat.
This was actually quite common with old PC 3D video cards. Apparently people who were into over-clocking their cards would take them apart, wipe the glue off with ethanol and then solder the chips back on so that they could withstand the increased heat!
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