Xbox 360 Failure Rate Still Hovering Around 10%
By James Walker
The newer, cooler running processors installed in the new Xbox 360s promised to bring about an end to the dreaded Red Ring of Death. If that is true, then why is one insider saying that the Xbox 360s failure rate is still hovering around 10%?
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In an interview with 8bitjoystick (who correctly broke the story of Bungie leaving Microsoft), an unnamed person who has “worked on the Xbox 360 project for many years” talked at great lengths about the Xbox 360s continuing Red Ring of Death concerns. The conversation spends much of its time talking about the possible causes for the Red Rings, with reasons ranging from overheating due to lead-free soldering, to defective heat sinks, to even corrupt BIOS or OS which, considering the recent string of troubles Xbox 360 owners have had with their consoles, seems more plausible now than it would have in the past.
However, the official reasoning for why the Xbox 360 continues to brick is the excessive heat from the GPU. As explained by the anonymous interviewee:
RROD is caused by anything that fails in the “digital backbone” on the mother board. Also known as a core digital error. CPU, GPU, memory, etc. Bad parts, incompatible parts (timing problems) bad manufacturing process (like solder joints), misapplied heat sinks or thermal interface material, missing parts, broken parts, parts of the wrong value, missed test coverage. Any one or more, on any chip, or many other discrete components, would cause this. And many of the failures were obviously infant mortality, where they work when they leave the factory and fail early in use. The main design flaw was the excessive heat on the GPU warping the mother board around it. This would stress the solder joints on the GPU and any bad joints would then fail in early life.
There are also other significantly high failure rates in other areas, like the DVD.
Seems like a logical, if not glaring design flaw that Microsoft should have looked into fixing before the consoles 2005 release. Regardless, how are the new consoles holding up?
I’ve heard that the failure rates for the current design is sub 10%. Much much better, but still too high imoh. And those designs haven’t seen much life yet, so no one knows if that failure rate will hold.
10% is indeed quite the improvement, but still not good enough. Both the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii have failure rates of under 1%, so while the Xbox 360 may have cut its failure rate by two thirds (time will tell), their console still bricks ten times more than the competition.
Simply unacceptable, if you ask me.
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on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
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Tips N4G
January 20th, 2008
So somebody without the guts to tell us his name is saying this? This is the first I have heard of it, and I have read plenty of reports that are the exact opposite of this.
James and Tristan are true Sony fanboys. Maybe there is something else going on behind the scenes between these two? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
January 20th, 2008
Oh please, this article isn’t very biased, u must hav been living under a rock for ages. Everyone knows that at the height of RROD failures, the 360 failure rate was up in the 30%. So having the 10% failure rate seems about right for the console, i hear problems about it al the time
January 20th, 2008
@Bigfella
I spent a year writing for “Xbox360Rally”, nitwit. I think that, by law, disqualifies me from ever being a “Sony fanboy”.
January 20th, 2008
He’s a fanboy.
January 21st, 2008
It’s against the law to be a fanboy now? That’s not America, that’s not even Mexico.
February 1st, 2008
It annoys me that people still say OMG XBOX360 SUX THE BREAK DOWN ALL THE TIME… but most of that has been fixed i wish PS3 fans got over that cause its all most in the past