Here's How Microsoft Solved The Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death

in 2005 microsoft released their xbox 360 one year ahead of the playstation 3. it was a big deal for them because it gave them that head start that helped them throughout the active generation it wasn't till the end when sony started to really cut down prices and continue to even track sales past when microsoft was that the playstation 3 have eventually caught up and even kind of passed the 360. but throughout that generation the 360 while getting out early still had a pretty serious problem that became infamous technically it was three problems that being three red lights that would pop up when your system would fail they dealt with a failure rate so high that was in some instances reported through surveys as over 50 percent that they ended up having to spend over 1 billion dollars just replacing all of the xbox 360s and throughout that generation they actually worked behind the scenes in an attempt to eliminate that red ring and bring the failure rates way way down and today i wanted to show you guys one of the best revisions ever going from the stock xbox 360 when we first got it up to the xbox 360 s or the xbox 360 slim it kind of depends on i guess how you see it because it's not technically that much smaller than the regular xbox 360. i think it was only like 20 percent smaller or something but it made a massive difference inside of it because microsoft redid the entire thing like it's almost a brand new system so we'll be opening this up and i kind of want to just go over some things with you guys and i think it's really interesting what microsoft managed to do because they went very very far with this revision in an attempt to fix that red ring and some of the things that they came up with in here are still being used today even on the xbox series s also i got this on ebay and there's stuff floating around in it so you know it could be fun so if you guys do enjoy the video make sure you like it on the way out and uh we'll see what's rattling around in inside of this thing hopefully it's nothing too crazy generally it will be broken plastic because at the top here is how they kind of hold it together through clips and a lot of times i would see these clips come in and they'll be broken like this one already kind of has clips broken it seems anyway because this was kind of just rattling around on top so thanks ebay but i something i've noticed these systems are actually kind of going back up in price right it's very strange i'm not really sure why that is why they are jumping back up in price but it's something i noticed that they randomly started doing that so i guess keep that in mind these are still really cool systems to have if you're someone who's into like the modding scene as people have been able to do some really cool things with these now one of the first big additions to this system and they made a big deal about it was the built-in wi-fi that's it right here it technically was just a plug-in one through usb and they hid it inside the system right here but it was very easy to remove or replace if you had to and these would fail but it wasn't part of the board it wasn't soldered to it or anything like that it even has the antenna built in right here so they assume you might stand your 360 up like this this is the top so the antenna would be straight up at that you know at the top at the best height if it's on its side it might not get as good of reception especially if it's in your entertainment center so keep that in mind your antenna is actually right at the top right at the back of it now if we flip over to the other side the other big addition was that it had an internal hard drive that you could pop out if you needed to it was in like this little shell it had like a 250 gigabyte model i don't know if they played around with too many other ones i'm trying to remember but we would do all kinds of stuff which included reshelling older 360 hard drives and putting them in with one of those plastics they would sell them on amazon for like 10 bucks and if you took your old hard drive the 360 one that sat on top you could take it apart put it in a shell and drop it in and it would work fine now getting these things apart was always a pain for a lot of people because they use clips and you can't really see them too well so if you've never taken one of these apart you're gonna fight with it a lot but eventually you'll get used to it and you can kind of just find the clips without even really having to look too much and it'll just pop off there's just like several of these clips here that grab onto things inside of the case i don't know if this thing was dropped or something because this is already popping out like that so what we would do is we would open it up here we have other clips inside on on here and this was a pain this was one of the worst systems to take apart when it comes to clips if you do not like clips you will not like taking apart the xbox uh 360 s it was a real pain so there we go this comes off again several clips they're all over the place and it was really annoying to get apart but we have that part off there hey the warranty sticker's still on so i'm not really sure what that plastic was that was rattling around i think it's still in there oh wait there's some plastic that felt i don't know just plastic all over the place maybe someone tried to open it up and uh they broke one of the clips or something hard to say now the one unfortunate part about going to this xbox 360 slim and it might not have been a big deal to everyone we lost the removable faceplates like they'd release uh some faceplates alongside of games that would come out i used to have a halo one i really liked it but they got rid of the ability to do that it just became part of the system which i guess made it look more like all one piece that was the thing with those 360 faceplates is they didn't quite look flush all the way around at all times this did i just it was something that i did miss when i ended up getting this also they got rid of those memory cards remember we used to have those little memory cards that would go like right here below the disk drive for the xbox 360. they just eventually patched in the ability to use usb sticks and format those and one less thing they had to produce then and honestly the usb6 are much better anyway because they got so much cheaper than like where they have a 512 megabyte card that was their big card for the for the memory cards on the xbox 360. although i think we mostly just use those to put profiles on anyway we are getting close to where some of the large changes are inside we got to remove that warranty sticker and then start unscrewing a ton of screws like this is what they always do they put a ton of torque screws some of these go all the way through to hold the casing down other ones work to keep the motherboard as flat as possible because while i know a lot of people talk about heat for example as to why the red ring would pop up a lot of it also had to do with the ability the board had to flex in the 360 it would flex like crazy and then solder balls underneath of the gpu would crack or even ram and at that point it would just say i don't know what to do and go red ring and that was it so people would do things like wrap it in a towel and when you did wrap it in a towel all the heat would stay inside the system and people would essentially cook the system long enough so that it would kind of rese the board would flatten out a little bit like that but the biggest thing when you have solder balls expand and get smaller and larger and that would help with the connection but it wouldn't be a very strong connection and that's why it would at times fail maybe 30 minutes to an hour later sometimes it would last days weeks but it would eventually die again that was just a band-aid essentially hey it actually looks pretty clean not bad very good so this is our system completely right here now we have our large fan and this is something we'll come back to because this was one of the biggest changes that they managed to do to make this a lot better we have our disk drive here that was actually a problem believe it or not for this system a pretty big problem in fact out of everything that would fail in this system the disk drive was the worst which i guess wasn't terrible because you could just replace the entire disk drive if you needed to but a lot of times the door for example would be jammed out because the plastics were a little cheaper inside so it would get stuck and you have to get it reset sometimes even opening this up completely other times if you had a disc inside of it and you moved it this one was worse than the original 360 and it would burn like this ring into it and we got a nice little ring on the outside there a lot of times that was just because the disc drive itself the laser was like hitting the disk at a bad angle and just putting this perfect circle into it it was a real annoying thing to deal with now this is a four gigabyte model so you can see we have this this is our flash memory so this is the four gigabytes that they have on board which was good to see that they included some sort of storage on board the system they started doing that i think with the jasper units they added on-board storage which was good because then you could like store your profiles and stuff on there without having to have a hard drive which at the time when it came out a 20 gigabyte hard drive was over 100 which was insane now they do still have a front button board here however you don't press anything on it it actually runs through a ribbon cable to that face plate that holds any of the touch sensors there and then we can start pulling off our little wind tunnel here now with the regular 360 one of the biggest problems with it was the distance with the cpu and the gpu to where it was actually exhausting the air it had to pull air all the way through the system so our fans would have been back here and it would have pulled air from here and our cpu and gpu would have been here with two separate heat sinks and two smaller fans and the idea was these fans had to spin fast enough to create a suction to pull from the front all the way to the back of the system and that was terrible because i mean how loud was your 360 back in the day it was it was probably pretty loud especially when you're playing some pretty serious games but then you get this and it was much quieter and a lot of has to do with the new design they went with for the heatsink and the fan all right there we go i removed the motherboard from the casing i pulled the old x clamp off here along with our heatsink and our fan and now we can get a look at the overall board and some of the changes they made so there's a really good pdf that was put out in 2010 by hot chips where they talked about the differences between the xbox 360 s when it was a 250 gigabyte model that first released versus the original xbox 360 and even some of the revisions from like 2007 and 2008 that they did with that system and the difference is pretty staggering obviously the biggest difference is they could they condense down to one chip so in 2005 they started with a 90 nanometer fabrication they went to a 65 nanometer fabrication and then they went down to a single chip on a 45 nanometer fabrication this was a really big deal for them at the time because the only system that really had started this trend was the ps2 slim that came out a bit obviously before this but they decided to take that same approach take both chips the gpu and the cpu and work it down to one ship that they could effectively cool now because they were also working with one pool of memory of course they can have everything set up right around the chip nice and neat and then they do still have their 10 megabytes of faster ed ram on the board itself and you know what we will remove this heat spreader so i can show it to you guys but first one of the other big things they pointed out was the overall efficiency and power it does draw significantly less power than the original 360 which of course would help with heat and the overall noise that the system makes trying to cool it and a lot of that has to do with their cap placement and efficiency in one section here whereas on the original 360 they were all the way around just one side i mean it took up a large section of the board so a lot more power was being drawn in which of course means you have to then figure out a way to cool it and then of course the fan and the heatsink itself was much better i mean this is one fan that they had to worry about spinning whereas on the older 360 you had two fans in the back that had to account for both the 360s cpu and the gpu each one having their own heatsinks so let's say the cpu is getting hotter the fans would spin up for that let's say the gpu was it was kind of all over the place and a mixed bag and because they were relying on a suction through a wind tunnel that was fairly long they had to ramp those fans up quite a bit so you ended up with a lot of noise so by taking the fan and the heatsink and essentially mashing it up against the exit which was the vent on the side of the xbox 360 slim they made it so that the air did not have to travel as far or have as much of a suction effect and they pretty much just screwed it right to the top of the heatsink much like what you may have seen with cpu coolers they decided to do the same thing here it even got closer to the exit that way it worked a lot better and it kept the fan from having to spin nearly as much so you take this much better cooling solution and then also add to the fact that they went down to a 45 nanometer process combining the cpu and the gpu everything came together for a much more quieter and much more efficient system so now i'm gonna go ahead and remove this heat spreader so we can get a better look at the chip itself all right and there we go heat spreader is off they just use glue around the edges so usually you can cut it if you have a thin enough blade or something like this piece of metal that you shave down really really well you just gotta go around the edges and it'll pop off of there now it was very unusual to ever have to remove the heat spreader on one of these xbox 360 slim chips usually there wasn't anything wrong with it like it was a pretty solid chip overall and most times the issue would be with something like the south bridge or the disk drive itself so even this i've probably only done like three or four of these chips so now that we have a nice clean look at the apu itself what they did was they combined the cpu and the gpu from the original 360. remember we had two separate chips that are fairly large and then we had kind of a small little chip on that gpu that was the ed ram what they did was they took both cpu and gpu mashed them together into this die right here and then for that ed ram they left it still on the chip and that's right here that's why this kind of still looks like an older xbox 360 gpu because the ed ram is this piece here that was just faster memory that could be used for different things in the game i know people would say oh the the 360 like free anti-aliasing stuff because of that well developers would use it for different things that they felt necessary at the time but of course it had to stay there in order for it to still work just like a regular 360 would when they moved to this new design it's really impressive if you think about it in a five-year period they went from what the 360 originally was with those two chips 90 nanometer fabrication down to a single chip here on the board with everything mashed together into this one die still having the same compatibility overall while radically changing the system like i said this isn't just like a small revision when they did it they're like oh we made it a little smaller and it's a little quieter they changed a lot anyway guys that's gonna do it here for the xbox 360 slim it's just a fun video to take apart a 360 slim and show you guys some of the differences between this and the regular xbox 360. it was quite a bit right over five years microsoft had to put out over a billion dollars to replace all of those systems that had gotten a red ring so it makes sense why they would want to make this system because they took the red ring out they can get a red dot but not a red ring so they're good right actually they changed so much in here that the failure rate on these systems plummeted compared to the original 360 and they even carried some of the knowledge they gained here forward into the next generation with single chip socs that they decided to use and even their little heat sink and fan combination and jamming it up against the outside of the casing something that will follow this system forward to the xbox series s but let me know what you guys think about this one down below make sure you like the video if you enjoyed it dislike it if not and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Spawn Wave

Views: 184,671

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

Keywords: spawn wave, spawn wave media, xbox, xbox 360, video games, red ring of death, rrod, rrod xbox 360, tear down, tear down xbox 360, xbox 360 slim, xbox 360 slim apu, microsoft fix rrod, rrod 360 slim fix, xbox 360 s, xbox 360 slim tear down, cpu, gpu, xcgpu

Id: R4zTvdnxJQE

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/NeonGamer6]

The fix wasn't the slim, the slim is actually a piece of junk and it fails left right and center these days, the most reliable Xbox's that never fail are the late falcon, and Jasper/Kronos

[u/Octal450]

Nah they fixed it in Late Falcon by fixing a flaw in the GPU manufacturing. Was part of GPU plague. That's why a new chip is required as the die fails or becomes detached from the flip chip substrate.

[u/FakeSypha]

Ppl just need to get their facts right. "Red ring of death" is an indication of "hardware malfunction". Yes, is that vague. And it can go from a blown mosfet that prevents feeding the right voltages to different parts of the motherboard, to a dead chip like the southbridge, to a short on the USB ports, to a cold solder below the XCPU or XGPU, and so on. All those errors correspond with a particular code to narrow it down. So there's no magical fix M$ could have done to answer every one of the possible hardware related issues, that are unavoidable with electronics. Shit will likely happen if it has to.