Have the 3 red lights on the ‘Ring of Death’ prevented you from playing your favorite Xbox 360 games?
Well let me tell you, I’ve been there a few times before. One time it was only 2 months after I bought the console, which was fine because the game store gave me a direct replacement because it was still under warranty. However, out of warranty is a real headache. You can pay $140 to Microsoft for a repair and have to wait 2-3 weeks for your console to come back. Worse still is that I heard some reports that when the Xbox 360 returned from Microsoft, the notorious 3 red doom lights returned shortly after.
So what causes Xbox 360 hardware failure?
The root cause of the ‘ring of death’ is the design of the heat sinks, primarily the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). The GPU heat sink is located just below the Xbox 360 CD drive and as such the heat sink is too small for the heat generated, it is only 10mm (3/8″) tall,
While the CPU (Central Processing Unit) is about 50mm (2″) tall and comes with a liquid cooler!
Microsoft, in Elite, slightly changed the design so that the liquid cooling extends to the GPU, which keeps the temperature even between the GPU and the CPU, thus lowering the overall temperature at which the system operates.
So the bottom line is that constant exposure to high temperatures causes the motherboard to warp slightly, resulting in cracking of some of the solder joints on the board. That triggers a hardware failure and 3 red lights appear on your Xbox 360.
After searching online for solutions to this problem, the only free solution was the ‘towel trick’. You may have heard of it. The ‘towel trick’ has worked for some people, but the ‘Ring of Death’ rears its ugly head again soon after.
As always with the Internet, if you want good, reliable information, you have to pay for it. I found over 10 Xbox 360 guides on the web, all of them claiming to fix in 30 minutes, some say 1 hour and some say 2 hours. While most guides offer good explanations and step-by-step instructions, there are some guides that give you summary information from the best guides out there.
So as I am a lover of computer games and have a degree in Electronic Engineering, I decided to take action and go through the top 6 best selling guides and narrowed them down to a Top 3.
No Comment