Lately some explanations have come out as to why the Xbox 360 seems to be so prone to failure and in a word it's heat and the poor management of it. Even though Microsoft’s Mr. Holmdahl, the guy ultimately responsible for the quality of the Xbox 360 continues to say “I would say we don’t have a high defect rate.
The vast majority of people are really excited about their product, and that we are targeting profitability for next year.” Though when asked specifically if the Xbox 360 falls into the normal failure rate of consumer electronics of three to five percent, Holmdahl said, “We don’t comment on that.” .
Microsoft continues to fight the heat problem in the Xbox 360 with different revisions in its design. The CPU’s have a fair amount of cooling, they have a very large heatsink connected to them that is in the open as well as an enclosure direct to the fans on the back to blow that hot air out. The GPU however is what people expect is the problem and current design changes seem to support the theory. The GPU heatsink is larger but relatively thin because the DVD-ROM sits on top of it with very little clearance. The air stream enclosure is still there but is most likely ineffective in cooling a long flat heatsink because of the way it’s designed.
Another problem, the heatsink is held on with an X clamp which puts a lot of pressure on the motherboard. This normally isn’t a problem except that the GPU is so ineffectively cooled that it does become a potentially serious problem.
As you’re playing very GPU intensive games (system killers as the community has dubbed them), the GPU heats up. The cooling mechanism is ineffective so the GPU is running hotter than it should be. This conducts heat into the motherboard and into the solder joints. When you heat up solder joints and a system board that have a high pressure X clamp, the motherboard can start to warp. Boards can withstand some minor warping but with the level of heat we’re talking about, the solder joints begin to loose strength and can disconnect or create cold solder joints. This causes your 3 rings of death or the single red light of death system error failure.
Microsoft has taken measures to fix these problems. The Elite came with some epoxy to try and help keep the GPU connected to the motherboard. However if temps are hot enough to loosen solder, I’m not sure what they thing epoxy is going to do. In the latest designs, the GPU heatsink now has a daughter heatsink out in the open inside the box, just in front of the CPU heatsink. The two heatsinks are connected together with a copper pipe to conduct heat from one to the other. With how close the daughter heatsink is to the cpu heat sync, it’s possible that it will pick up some draft from the fans cooling the cpu’s. In the very least, the heat has somewhere else to go because it’s not being held down by the DVD Rom.
Ultimately though, cooling the Xbox 360 in it’s current design just isn’t very effective. The only hope Xbox 360 owners have are the new 65nm CPU and CPU models which hopefully will be available by the fall. These new chips will run significantly cooler and will help eliminate these heat related failures.
We have to take our hats off to Sony though with the Playstation 3 cooling design. The Playstation 3 has a single heatsink for it’s chips but it’s huge taking up probably 25% of the room inside the Playstation 3. It has a large round hole in the middle were an extremely large fan sits blowing air through the horizontal fins of the heatsync. Being a large fan it can move a lot of air at a lower RPM which means much less noise and lets not forget, the Playstation 3 has the power supply inside. Can you imagine the heat inside the Xbox 360 with an internal power supply?
All in all, while the Xbox 360 is a great machine, we hope Microsoft has learned a thing or two about console manufacturing and heat dissipation. Even though they will never admit there’s a problem, there are hints such as their new redesigned customer service program. Lets hope they put a little more thought into cooling for the next Xbox.
Photos:
Current Xbox360 Cooling setup
New Xbox360 GPU heatsync setup
Playstation 3 heatsink
Microsoft continues to fight the heat problem in the Xbox 360 with different revisions in its design. The CPU’s have a fair amount of cooling, they have a very large heatsink connected to them that is in the open as well as an enclosure direct to the fans on the back to blow that hot air out. The GPU however is what people expect is the problem and current design changes seem to support the theory. The GPU heatsink is larger but relatively thin because the DVD-ROM sits on top of it with very little clearance. The air stream enclosure is still there but is most likely ineffective in cooling a long flat heatsink because of the way it’s designed.
Another problem, the heatsink is held on with an X clamp which puts a lot of pressure on the motherboard. This normally isn’t a problem except that the GPU is so ineffectively cooled that it does become a potentially serious problem.
As you’re playing very GPU intensive games (system killers as the community has dubbed them), the GPU heats up. The cooling mechanism is ineffective so the GPU is running hotter than it should be. This conducts heat into the motherboard and into the solder joints. When you heat up solder joints and a system board that have a high pressure X clamp, the motherboard can start to warp. Boards can withstand some minor warping but with the level of heat we’re talking about, the solder joints begin to loose strength and can disconnect or create cold solder joints. This causes your 3 rings of death or the single red light of death system error failure.
Microsoft has taken measures to fix these problems. The Elite came with some epoxy to try and help keep the GPU connected to the motherboard. However if temps are hot enough to loosen solder, I’m not sure what they thing epoxy is going to do. In the latest designs, the GPU heatsink now has a daughter heatsink out in the open inside the box, just in front of the CPU heatsink. The two heatsinks are connected together with a copper pipe to conduct heat from one to the other. With how close the daughter heatsink is to the cpu heat sync, it’s possible that it will pick up some draft from the fans cooling the cpu’s. In the very least, the heat has somewhere else to go because it’s not being held down by the DVD Rom.
Ultimately though, cooling the Xbox 360 in it’s current design just isn’t very effective. The only hope Xbox 360 owners have are the new 65nm CPU and CPU models which hopefully will be available by the fall. These new chips will run significantly cooler and will help eliminate these heat related failures.
We have to take our hats off to Sony though with the Playstation 3 cooling design. The Playstation 3 has a single heatsink for it’s chips but it’s huge taking up probably 25% of the room inside the Playstation 3. It has a large round hole in the middle were an extremely large fan sits blowing air through the horizontal fins of the heatsync. Being a large fan it can move a lot of air at a lower RPM which means much less noise and lets not forget, the Playstation 3 has the power supply inside. Can you imagine the heat inside the Xbox 360 with an internal power supply?
All in all, while the Xbox 360 is a great machine, we hope Microsoft has learned a thing or two about console manufacturing and heat dissipation. Even though they will never admit there’s a problem, there are hints such as their new redesigned customer service program. Lets hope they put a little more thought into cooling for the next Xbox.
Photos:
Current Xbox360 Cooling setup
New Xbox360 GPU heatsync setup
Playstation 3 heatsink
