#Xbox 360 s red ring of death how to#
#Xbox 360 s red ring of death professional#

GPUs have the most radical thermal shifts of surface mounted components on a motherboard, even compared to CPUs.

However, the component that BGA mounts most typically use, GPUs, make that composition important. Industry analyses of solder ball manufacture show a high rate of voids regardless of solder composition. The manufacturing technique for making solder balls doesn't check for the presence of voids (bubbles) inside them. At that time, there was no mandate from the EU to use nonleaded solders, so BGA mounts weren't extensively tested using nonleaded solders. To understand why this can cause problems, you have to go back to when BGA mounts were invented, the 1990s. The GPU on an Xbox 360 is mounted using something called a ball grid array, where individual balls of solder connect a bare GPU's contacts to holes in the circuit board below. Hamster_Black Smack-Fu Master, in training jump to post.As always, when buying a 'repaired' gadget, caveat emptor. Don't worry, though-GameStop will extend the standard 30-day warranty on that refurbished system to a year, for a price. Perhaps GameStop's repair solution is somehow more robust and long-lasting than this kind of trick, but without a fuller heat sink replacement (which requires opening up the system), it seems likely that those GameStop-refurbished systems are destined to see the red rings once more. That's usually enough to get a system working again for hours or even months more, but consoles revived with this kind of heating method almost always fail again at some point thanks to the inherent design flaws of the motherboard, according to numerous reports.

#Xbox 360 s red ring of death professional#

The method as described in Businessweek sounds like a more professional version of the famous towel trick, which used a trapped heat and cooling cycle to re-melt solder on the damaged graphics chip. Still, there's some reason to believe that GameStop's red ring solution might be more of a temporary band-aid than a permanent repair. Fixing those 'worthless' systems and reselling them for hundreds of dollars would be a profit center for any company. While a 2012 Verge piece on GameStop's repair operation suggests that GameStop employees 'aren't supposed to accept trade-ins of Xbox 360 systems with the ,' there are numerous anecdotal reports of local outlets accepting red-ringed systems for as much as $85 of trade-in credit in recent years.

A refurbished console can be sold at close to its original price. The fix is now regularly carried out by a $10-per-hour laborer operating a machine that GameStop built itself.

GameStopРІР‚в„ўs R&D team discovered that the problem could be solved by heating up the top of the device while cooling it from below, reconnecting a damaged chip to the motherboard without ruining it.

#Xbox 360 s red ring of death how to#

Forums and websites ( this one included) filled with talk of the ' towel trick,' ' heat sink replacement instructions,' and ' X-clamp repair kit sets.'Р”Р„mid all this chatter, apparently, GameStop has been working on its own industrialized solution for the problem, repairing and reselling red-ringed systems as 'refurbished' since 2009.Р”Р„s part of an excellent Bloomberg Businessweek report on the state of GameStopР’В in an increasingly digital gaming world, author Joshua Brustein talks about how the gaming retail giant developed and industrialized a method for turning broken, red-ringed Xbox 360 units into resellable, 'refurbished' systems.Р”Р„ boon for GameStop in 2009 was figuring out how to solve the so-called Red Ring of Death, a faulty connection between the chip and motherboard that rendered Xbox 360 consoles useless. While Microsoft extended warranties and upgraded chipsets amid the console-killing plague, desperate console owners scrambled for their own homemade solutions. The mid-to-late 2000s were a scary time to be an Xbox gamer, with the infamous Red Ring of Death claiming countlessР’В consoles seemingly without warning.