XBox 360 Red Rings Of Death: The Truth
If you are the owner of a XBox 360, you most probably have suffered the red rings of death. We have the same problem with our console. Finally we have some answers and here is the in depth investigation by reporter Dean Takahashi. Here are some excerpts from the report.
Microsoft knew it had flawed machines, but it did not delay its launch because it believed the quality problems would subside over time. …when the company launched its Xbox 360 video game console in November, 2005, it didn’t have a handle on product quality and it was not prepared to systematically analyze its product returns and debug bad consoles.
The defect rate for the machines was an abysmal 68 percent at that point, according to several sources. That meant for every 100 machines that Microsoft’s contract manufacturers, Flextronics and Wistron, made at their factories in China, 68 didn’t work. Microsoft had more than 500,000 defective consoles that sat in warehouses. They were either duds coming out of the factory or they were returned boxes, according to inside sources.
So what exactly was wrong with the machines? As time would reveal, there was no single reason for the failures, though many of the problems could be blamed on the ATI graphics chip, which could overheat so much it warped the motherboard. This put stress on bad solder joints, causing them to fail early in the machine’s life.
Source: Xbox 360 defects: an inside history of Microsoft’s video game console woes
on September 7th, 2008 at 9:29 am
ive had mine since launch ive had no problem so far but i hope it dies soon so i can get a new one before the guarantee runs out
on September 7th, 2008 at 10:15 am
You’re pretty late to the party if you are just now blogging this. This is much more of a non-issue than ever before. The defect rate has dropped dramatically due to changes in manufacturing. AND Microsoft is still sponsoring a 3-year warranty for related Red Ring errors.
If someone is still rocking a launch unit, I would expect, due to the mechanical nature of the failure, that they got a system with good solder joints. The hardware has been revised twice since launch, so the odds of seeing these kinds of failures should be falling by the day.