A solution for the Xbox 360 VGA failure?
Last year at CES 2006 we broke the news of CoolIt’s ground-breaking Xbox 360 Cooling. Back then, the plan was that engineers around the world would be trained in fitting the cooling system, which, if we’re honest looked a bit bulky and, dare we say, ugly, slapped on the side of your Xbox 360.
But this new version looks a lot smoother and though it’s still bloody massive, the whole effect is far neater.
Click for larger imageNow you might be wondering why you’d want to cool your Xbox 360 anyway, which is a fair point. But some people do find the Xbox 360 to be unduly noisy, especially if that sit near where their Xbox 360 is running. So there’s one reason right there… it quiets the whole thing down.
But there’s something a bit more interesting going on here, especially when you take that last Autumn Update from Microsoft into account and the subsequent failures various folk suffered… bear with me, this’ll all make sense in the end…
Do a bit of research about the big Autumn Update and you’ll find more than a few people complaining of serious hardware failures shortly after the update. The odd thing was, some people had no problems at first, then their Xbox 360s failed. Others failed almost straight away with others failing later. It wasn’t until some enterprising chap opened up his Xbox 360 that a possible cause was found… the GPU soldering.
Apparently, the GPU on an Xbox 360 isn’t socketed but soldered into the board. This wasn’t a problem until the Autumn Update, which upscaled the video output to 1080, which obviously put more strain on the GPU… This caused the GPU to generate more heat. Now all of this sounds fine as it wasn’t overheating that was causing these Xbox 360s to fail… or was it?
Click for larger imageAs it turns out, the extra heat from the GPU whilst not causing an overheating issue, was having an effect on the solder attaching the GPU to the mainboard. Regular power up and power downs of the Xbox 360 appeared to be causing expansion and contraction stress fractures in the solder… which gave a variety of problems over varying lengths of time… which would explain the odd failure rates after the Autumn Update.
Now, this is where CoolIt and their Xbox 360 cooling could come in very handy. Their solution cools the GPU, which will help combat that expansion/contraction problem with the GPU solder… and here’s the kicker, if, like me, you picked up an Xbox 360 early, it’s now out of warranty anyway, so what have you got to lose? Either keep your Xbox 360 on all the time or turn it on and off as little as possible… Either that or look at getting CoolIt to retro fit their cooling system which will not only hush up your Xbox 360 but possibly prevent it falling over as you upscale the output to your big-ass TV…
[advert]
