I thought I had like the Heroes version of the Xbox 360. Friend after friend would call me and tell me they would have to send their Xbox 360’s back to Imaginationland for repair. I scoffed and said that I had the immortal console and it would never die. Last night after watching Ironman on Blu-Ray, which was awesome, I put in Marvel Ultimate Alliance so I could do a little Avengers action and beat some ass. Screen freeze. Um, what. I rebooted and this happened twice again. Fuck. Then it froze at the boot screen. Then… death. I was actually saddened. I called the MS Help Center and then were really helpful, which surprised the shit out of me. I should get the coffin in a couple days and a refurbished model in 3 weeks.
Luckily, I have an Xbox 360 in my room also and another in my attic. One of them gets promoted to the big leagues. Its hard to believe it lasted this long and even harder that Matt went through ten of them. I think his rabbits piss on and hump them.
The Xbox 360 had a ton of problems and an alarming failure rate. We all speculated that it was an overheating issue and we finally now get the low down on what will go down as one of the biggest design flaws in tech history.
In an Aug. 30, 2005 memo, the team reported overheating graphics chip, cracking heat sinks, cosmetic issues with the hard disk drive and the front of the box, under-performing graphics memory chips from Infineon (now Qimonda), a problem with the DVD drive, and other things.
The test machines were not properly debugged, due to an ill-advised cost-cutting initiative that shaved $2 million from $25 million paid to Cimtek, a test machine maker in Canada. The Microsoft team decided not to pay the consulting fee to Cimtek to build, manage and debug the test machines. Sources familiar with the matter said there were only about 500 test machines at the time of launch, a third of the 1,500 needed.
“There were so many problems, you didn’t know what was wrong,” said one source of the machines. “The [test engineers] didn’t have enough time to get up and running.”
So it turns out, there was a slew of things gone terribly wrong. They had a shitty product that had a tremendous upside but was not ready to go to market. They have tried to make it right with the 3 year warranty and all but for the millions of consumers who had to wait while their new and expensive console was shipped in coffins, there is a rift that may never be mended.
This user claims that he just got his console back from MS and it sounds like a motorboat. I’m not calling shenanigans yet, but this is insanely loud. We all know these things are far from perfect. Listen to this. There is no way he can play games with this in the background.
Number one through nine obviously didn’t pan out. All died from either disc read errors or the Red Ring of Death. Number 9, a Falcon, suffered the dreaded RRoD a little over a week ago. Finally, I have a replacement Elite. It’s obviously a Falcon, so I can only hope this one works out better than the last Falcon that crapped the bed on me.
Everyone keep their fingers crossed that Xbox 360 stops hating me. I really don’t want to have to replace it again.
This is just very very annoying. While playing some Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Beta yesterday, my Xbox 360 went all RRoD on me. I made a sad face. I have the Best Buy warranty for a reason, but come on. I had such confidence in this one after Max’s marathon Halo 3 sessions.
I let the poor sick console sit overnight and tried to fire it up today, hoping it was just a fluke. Nope, she’s gone. Unfortunately, my Best Buy is out of Elites right now, so I have to wait until the end of the week when they hopefully get more in stock. You won’t be seeing me online for the next few days on Xbox Live. She was a Falcon, too. She’ll be sorely missed. To quote my article the last time a console died:
It’s not like I treat it like crap. It’s babied. My Xbox 360 has it’s own shelf in the entertainment center, with full ventilation from the front and rear. The power brick also sits on the shelf fully ventilated. The console is never moved when playing (in fact, it’s only moved a tiny bit once a week to dust). The console is kept perfectly clean, as are my other systems. I haven’t had any problems with my PS3 (save long install times) or my Wii. Never had problems with my PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube before that.
For the record, I’m tired of taking pictures of the Red Ring of Death when this happens. So you guys get to look an old RRoD from one of the Loot Ninja consoles.
We may finally know exactly what caused all the Red Ring of Death errors for Xbox 360’s, especially early models. Speaking at the Design Automation Conference, Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, dropped the info that the problem started in a graphic chip.
Microsoft decided to save some money by designing the graphic chip in-house instead of sending that off to people who know what they’re doing, like Nvidia or ATI. Since the chips weren’t designed properly, they caused major heat issues and everyone got a broken console.
After the fact, and to correct the problem, Microsoft had a graphics chip designer (most likely ATI) redesign the graphics chip to work properly. All is well now, but Microsoft ended up spending a shit-ton of money all because they tried to cut corners up front. Lesson learned kids: do things the right way the first time or spend a ton of money trying to fix your mistakes.
No one is immune. It’s spreading like AIDS from Scuba…
I was at Best Buy this Saturday afternoon picking up a couple of Blu-Ray movies when I happened upon this sight. Now, I’m in Best Buy at least once a week for various reasons. Whenever I’m there, I always stop by the video game section. I can attest to this Xbox 360 working on Thursday.
This isn’t the fist time I’ve seen this Best Buy hit by the Red Ring of Death either. The funniest part was some kid, half crying, asking his mom why this Xbox 360 wouldn’t work. Sadly, I didn’t want to take his picture for fear of being labeled a pedophile. But trust me, it was funny.
The famous Red Ring of Death is nothing new to anyone that has been playing video games the last couple of years, specifically anyone who has owned an Xbox 360. There have been many tails of people sending back easily a handful of Xbox’s to Microsoft because of the dreaded Red Ring, between the editors here alone we have sent back over a dozen easily.
In a recent article an independent company put out some stats:
Over 18 million Xbox 360s have sold through since the console’s launch in November 2005, but just how many of those are still working? Squaretrade, a company that specializes in providing warranty support to purchasers of electronic goods from various manufacturers, claims 16% of Xbox 360s experience a hardware failure within six to ten months after a warranty purchase. Three out of every five failures were for the infamous “Red Ring of Death” general hardware failure error, a problem often linked to overheating.
That many returns is a bit ridiculous and those numbers could even go higher with prolonged usage. Not a reigning endorsement for a quality product from the MS camp.
The article even goes on to talk about some helpful remedies, i.e. putting a fan on the back of your system, which should not be necessary if these units were engineered correctly from the get go. They even reference the famed towel trick, which only works for a short time so don’t depend on that to save you.
Hit the jump for some hints on how to not brick your 360.
I’m on my 9th Xbox 360. After 5 dead Premium systems since launch, I decided to spring for an Elite, with the hopes of better hardware. I was sadly mistaken, as I’ve gone through 3 Elites so far, with my 4th and current being a Falcon. I’ve had this one for two months now and haven’t had any issues. The reason I keep coming back, aside from the games (which I’ll touch on in a second), is the fact that I purchased the Best Buy warranty with both systems and have been able to swap it in store with no issue.
The games are really the reason I keep coming back. Exclusive titles like Gears of War, Ninja Gaiden 2, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Dead Rising, etc. are more than enough reason for me to want to keep the console. I’ve also built up a good list of friends over the past five and a half years.
Ruh Roh. At GDC, one of the display/demo Xbox 360 units in the XNA are got the Red Ring of Death. Quality Control at it’s finest. We all know that Xbox 360 reliability hasn’t been the best, but I think Microsoft should have done a bit better job on getting a demo unit a major industry conference working.
Check out the video from the BBC to see it all go down.
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