Xbox 360s serious heating problems revealed
Face it: the Xbox 360 isn’t quite up to snuff. The design is flawed, leading to an abnormal number of machines konking out. Since Microsoft won’t reveal the details of what exactly is causing the problems, Japanese news source Nikkei had a thermal design expert analyze the 360’s heat radiation system. Two Xbox 360’s were used for the investigation: one purchased in 2005, and the other that was repaired in May 2007. Their findings?
• The temperature gap with room temp was 22 degrees C. “When designing consumer products, it is common to seek a temperature gap of around 10 degrees C between exhaust and room temperatures,” the thermal design expert said. “The 22 degrees C is quite a large gap…”
• The cooling fan was half of desktop PCs — apparently to reduce noise.
• The expert pointed out, “The heat sink on the graphics LSI is so small, I wonder if it can really cool down the board.” The reason for this? Apparently, Microsoft had to downsized graphics LSI heat sink so that the DVD drive could be placed above it.
• In five minutes after booting up a game, the graphic LSI heat sink temp rose to 70 degrees C. In 15 minutes, the temperature for the microprocessor heat sink stabilized at 58 degrees, but the graphics LSI heat sink reached 80 degrees C. If the room temperature was high (like 35 degrees C), the heat sink could possibly hit 100 degrees C. What’s more, if the vents were clogged with dust, the temperature could also increase.
• The console repaired in May 2007 did not have a new heat sink placed in it.
This is bad design. Really, really bad.
Really, this is just proving what most people believed was true all along. Hopefully with this information hitting the internet Microsoft might act to fix the problem.
The fact that they haven’t fixed such obvious problems, problems that have cost them about $1.6 billion in repair costs. Frankly, it’s what they deserve for trying to jam so much power into such a tiny box.
A drastic redesign should be right around the corner so anyone who wants a 360, wait a few months and grab that Wii or PS3 for now.
Source: Kotaku
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