Here's Why A Refurbished Gamestop Xbox 360 Is A Waste Of Money

this is a certified premium refurbished xbox360 as it says on the front here from Gamestop now I picked this up because I wanted to take a look at a 360 at some point anyway and I thought it'd be interesting to get a refurbished system generally means that it comes in the GameStop defective they send it out to some place to repair it and then it comes back as a premium certified refurbished system which is what I have here now what's interesting about this is they're selling these pretty cheap actually right now I got it on pro day which was over the weekend and it was $40 for this system a wired controller cables and everything a little surprised at that price but hey I mean if you're on a budget and you're buying for maybe a gamer who is a little younger or brand-new to gaming even this isn't a bad gift considering the amount of games that you can get for this thing at a pretty cheap price but what do you get with a Gamestop refurbished system and I'm not talking about the controllers or anything what do you get when you buy it and it inside the system that's what we're gonna have fun with here because we're gonna open this guy up and we're gonna see what does come with it inside because there have been some horror stories on refurbished systems and it is kind of luck of the draw I didn't I just went in and said I want one of the older white 360s that were out you know in the mid to late to thousands and that's what they gave me so I don't know what has been done to it I don't know what was originally broken with this but we're gonna take it apart take a look at me or with it open right away it has a wired controller so if anything I got a wired controller out of the field yeah the sticks need some work they these sticks are very rubbed off so it doesn't have like the doesn't have like the little dots around it anymore and it's clearly been used but it's least works a button feels weird as well use controllers not always the best I would like to go for new ones obviously but it is Microsoft branded and everything so there we go we have a 360 wired controller also works for PC as it has like the USB plug on the end so you have like a Windows 7 or 10 PC even eight you can plug that in and boom you're off and running it's not concerned about that though obviously this is actually a one of the newer ish power supplies this is a 150 watt whereas the older ones were over 200 watts so that is this is a slightly newer 360 at the time then other power cord they also looks like to give you a bunch of instructions with it as well how to update your firmware with the system how to hook it up this is actually more important than you would think when we would sell these systems just used all the time people would always call and ask just I guess just about how it works what do you need to hook it up this is actually pretty good for people who are not as I guess literate with this kind of stuff Hamill actual cardboard backing in here as well which is good I haven't seen that at least a baby they're okay baby calves are a little berry they actually gave me component cables with this which is interesting I mean I guess for some people because it has the AV and the component is good but I just used an HDMI cable because I believe this one because I saw that power supply unless they gave me the wrong power supply yes it is an HDMI enabled system as for while there you would get these when they first came out and it would not have this at all it would just be this AV port here so this is a slightly newer one this is actually from 2009 and it even has like the GameStop refurbishment thing on there even has a Jasper sticker right there which is interesting that they have that tagged maybe it's just for when they're working on it and you can even tell it's already been open because it has the kind of spots here in the plastic where you would stick a flat head or an opening tool to pop it open on the back where the tabs are so everything there looks good we're gonna move this box out of the way just a throw that on the ground over here and here we are with our xbox 360 so it is the white plastic model on the front for the drive of course the drive also had like more of a I it looked more like a chrome plastic finish on the front as well this I guess is one of the arcade models doesn't come with a hard drive of course because I asked for the one without the hard drive but this is our system so we're gonna go ahead and I guess start taking it apart now when you first take these things apart you can get to take the faceplate off right away because that's how you get into it and we should also see a warranty sticker of some kind hmm well I see the one that they broke when they went into it but usually they have a warranty sticker of some kind for from the refurbishment center unless no that's on the back mmm I don't know why they don't have that on there but oh well you have to take these top panels off a lot of times you have some sort of very thin like flathead it'll work if you have to actually poke into some of these holes here and it'll start to actually pop up I never really liked the way that Microsoft set this system up to be taken apart because I guess they'd want to hide all the screws on the outside the best they could and I guess technically it worked because you don't really see any screws technically on the outside because it's all like a clamshell design to pull it apart I was never a big fan of how they did this so it makes it more annoying than anything else to have to take it apart right to top it off in the bottom off this one I'm going to do that because I guess they've they've popped it open so many times it just came right off and then the back panel here actually has spots on the back where you have to poke and then it will start to pop up there are actually tabs in there that you have to pop open so let's go ahead and get this front part open where these tabs are and then I can work my way around to the back and I'll pop that off as well okay so the backs now off and this is what we're seeing here with the metal chassis on the bottom a lot of issues right away okay so I can already tell with this system it does work but I don't think it's gonna work for very long I think that comes with a 30-day warranty I don't explain why because I'm already looking at a train wreck right now and this is gonna be this movie to be fun I can't tell so I noticed that some of these screws aren't all the way in this one for example is actually kind of loosened already this one same deal and otherwise though I think they're all screwed incorrectly they're supposed to be eight black screws here one two three four five six seven eight there are not and that usually means that they replace the X clamps with screws and washers and that's actually not a good thing which is interesting because ice we just got to that point where we all figured that was the way to fix them and that actually works the board pretty badly so when I take this part I'm gonna try to show you that but let me start getting these screws out there a bunch of t tens all the way around there should be t eights here but there are not so that should make it pretty easy to get through these and it's pretty easy to tell where they go because these longer T tends only fit in certain spots and they hold the case down on the other side so I'm very interested now to see what this refurbishment center did to this thing because it's um it's gonna be good alright so I have the screws out I'm gonna truth let's see what we're dealing with here let's see what we get okay so yeah there's a this is interesting okay so I knew this was already in here because when I turned it on you kind of hear it it has a fan mod done and this is a massive fan database levy but this whole system is basically set to fail again what they should have done if you do it right and this is what I would end up doing most times because there was if it's always gonna break otherwise is to reball these things andrey bowling is not fun it costs money it's time effort and skill all involved but you would basically lift the entire chip off you would replace all the solder balls underneath of it with leaded solder instead of unleaded and then it would all go back together and at that point it's gonna work much much better now the 360 is a flawed system from the factory and changing the slim design was way better for them but man this is I'm alright this is not good this thing whoever but if someone else bought this other than myself and took it home it might have got 30 days and then of course if you make it outside of that 30 day window and it fails game stuffs not really interested in helping you out there so I took the front panel off this is the panel where it'll light up when you turn it on bring at the different lights that go around obviously and it could change to red or anything like that that's how people actually change these boards if they want like different colors and stuff on them this is our drive this is a which one is this uh BenQ it's a Philips light on those are newer drives again people flash these drives and do all kinds of stuff to them so that you can there we go so you can read burn discs and everything it's very popular to do that I don't think this one's been open before now it has been yeah I guess they had opened the disk drive to maybe the disk drive was jammed as well these 360 just went through the ringer half the time so this is what they decided to do for their fan mod this is a very popular method the whole idea of a fan mod is stupid in the first place sorry it is I would I would get really annoyed when I would see these fan mods they tap into the disk drive power so if they can get different voltages and feed it to the fans so that it's really loud so if you get a 360 from Gamestop and it is loud right away take it back just do it don't it just take it back say I don't want this one I want a different one because if they have fan modded it that also more than likely means that they have done this screw and washer job and that means that it was probably a red ring at some point that means that it's probably going to die again fairly quickly the ones you want the reverse ones you want are the ones where there's just an issue with this disk drive whether it was stuck out or it wasn't reading that means that there were no failures on the board at that time and it's just that's what you want you don't want one of these the fan shroud comes off pretty quick it just pops off like this good news there the fan I'm not enroll you'll take out because it's just you just bend this plastic up and it comes out like that but you got a fight with a little bit and there's no need to because this fan mod I'm actually gonna I think I can pop this fan MOT out without needing to do that anyway but it's basically it's something you can get and it's just a it's basically a pass-through for the fan you can buy these in everything there like plugins and it's it's not a good it's not a good method to fix it aliases just a band-aid big time and it's just gonna fail again so we have all of our screws out the fans unplugged and this will actually show up from the front it'll come right out this is the metal chassis it actually uses this as well there try to keep the board straight that is the biggest failure point for the 360 is that the board will flex constantly I think it was actually designed to flex but I can already see this as bowed okay oh man this is not good okay I'm curious where they got this refurbishment done because this is not good I'm gonna show you what I'm talking about because this is something else all right so they we do at least have the better CPU heatsink here this is a larger aluminum fin that heatsink these are that these are pretty good this is the worst GPU heat you get they have GPU heat sinks where there's a separate bar that comes up and out and then in front of here so it also gets some benefit that fan pressure pushing it out this does not have that which is a shame because the GPU is the big failure point on these systems the CPU rarely failed when I would fix them I would very rarely have to reflow or reball it's a CPU this is another point that would fail back here the South Bridge the South Bridge would fail quite a bit and that would call sometimes no power there's the Haan a or we just call it the Hana chip back here that is responsible for HDMI in the older ones when we just had a V this was actually pin soldered down all around the edges much less in terms of failure there this would fail all the time as well pressure you could actually open these up you could put pressure on it and turn it on and if it will start turning on that that'll tell you right away at the the Hana chip was an issue again reflow really ball to fix that so I'm going to show you why I'm this is this isn't good there so here are the screws on the bottom I was telling you about you can see them there's eight of them usually put a metal washer or a metal and then a plastic washer generally there's none on the bottom look at this it's just the it's just the screw there's no like wash there you at least have that as a spacer just to help out and the board's been flexed because of this so when you screw these in you torque them down obviously you can kind of see the board even moving as I unscrew these the reason the ex clamp was put into place is because they knew this board was going to flex it flexes constantly and those ex clamps would actually allow the board to shift and move on its own so they did have some give to him but they would also hold the heatsink flush to the the GPU and it was an interesting way to make it work I know people yell about the ex clamp but it did actually have a purpose and there was a reason they use that they at least used one plastic a very very wide plastic washer on the top and they definitely went to town with the thermal compound as you can see there's oh man this 360 unfortunately kind of lost cause I don't even know if it's worth spending any time with just because of what's do it so far however I will be cleaning this off so we could take a look at the CPU and the GPU and everything CP was a try core PowerPC and then the GPU was interesting because it had a few kind of neat features I mean it was done by ATI and then of course everything got kind of moved over to AMD and everything so now we have systems that have AP use built in but they did have a you can even see they've branded it Microsoft but they use the PowerPC CPU and then an ATI GPU once again same deal with these screws four screws nothing on the bottom to help try like usually you do this to try to level it out because you can already see I can already see the board kind of flexed and I'll show you how easy it is to flex by the way this board since I don't really care too much about it now that I've seen what's happened to it I'd be concerned about this in general is because I'm gonna know for rebelling it would even cause the last to long because of how flex this board has already been let me sometimes you can leave it on a heater believe it or not of a preheat and it would actually straighten itself out especially when it was kind of put into a jig and I mean this is a real shame because this is one of the this is one of the newer GPUs before they went to that I can already tell because the die size before they went to that that slim design this is kind of a shame because this actually would have lasted if it was done correctly I don't even know if this was a red ring they might have just done this to as like a precaution but it's been it's been so damaged at this point um that's a shame I Polly I this is let me say this might be one of the like very very new ones usually that die size on these are much larger this larger die here is generally much closer to the smaller one yes this is a GPU that was used in some of the elites at the time going into 2010 and it is a very new one generally they ran a little cooler that's what the power supply is only 150 watts as opposed to the some of the first models having over 200 watt power supplies but this is the entire 360 here the CPU then we have RAM modules around the brain at 512 megabytes of RAM however it was one big pool ram which was an issue with the ps3 where they divided ram chips up where they actually put ram directly on the GPU and the ps3 and then around the cpu and they were trying to make it so that it was faster to access that memory but they also Microsoft also put very fast Ram on the the GPU as well 10 megabytes of that just help cache and textures and upscaling and everything just just extra fast memory that was available at the time to the GPU and it worked out most ports ran better on the 360 of course if developers took specific advantage of the ps3 you would get games like Uncharted right you'd get those kind of games look tremendous Metal Gear Solid 4 which is one of the best looking games a generation but the 360 was much better in terms of third-party support go get some like Bayonetta for example that was a disaster on the ps3 so let me show you what I'm talking about with this flexing so if you heat this board up which as systems work they do get hotter we all know that that's why they have fans while they blow out hot air this 360 board will generally flex and that's because it's a very thin board you kind of see how easy it is to flex when it's cold now when it gets hot even small flexing will actually managed to break solder balls or fracture them so when it's hot it's even easier to flex this board and you kind of see how that works so when you take screws and washers and you don't know really what you're doing and you start pulling this this these quarters will actually pull up to the heatsink and at that time you have a very very very messed up level around here so you can already kind of I can already feel with my finger you're running around it feels like it's got like a divot or a ditch kind of around that GPU and at that point you're in trouble because this systems going to shift and warp and move and the screws won't allow it to do that at that point the GPU suffers and you get a red ring yeah guys that is an Xbox 360 refurbished from Gamestop not a good look this was not a good system to pick up because it kind of went through like I said the ringer with screws and washers and a fan mod and it's it's a whole thing maybe I got one of the worst ones that I could have grabbed maybe I ended up with a bad pic if you will because you don't really know what you're getting in till you open it up some people probably never open them up so they would never know obviously but if you hear your fan going crazy on a Gamestop refurbished system and it's a 360 maybe you want to pick one up cheap to play around with it go take it back because that means that something happened inside that shouldn't look inside the system so let me know guys think about the 360 system we took apart here the GameStop refurbished system maybe will take you a more in-depth look down the road at specs and everything other 360 as well when we open one that's properly done hopefully a stock one straight up but let me know you guys think about this down below make sure you hit the like button if you like the guys dislike and if not and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Spawn Wave

Views: 1,933,208

Rating: 4.608995 out of 5

Keywords: xbox, xbox 360, tech wave, spawn wave media, gamestop xbox 360, refurbished, gamestop refurbished xbox 360, xbox system, take apart xbox 360, gamestop, whats inside xbox 360 gamestop, fan mod, gamestop xbox 360 2018, 2019, 2018, gamestop xbox 360 waste of money, waste of money

Id: AUVf9QSN9E8

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 11 2018