The cause of the infamous Xbox 360 "Red Ring of Death" failure

75519LI

Member
Anyone who has owned an Xbox 360 will know what the "Red Ring of Death", often abbreviated as RROD, is a sudden and fatal hardware failure that has occurred on a large number of Xbox 360 systems. When an Xbox 360 experiences a "Red Ring of Death" failure, its power button LED turns red instead of white and the system refuses to boot.

Xbox 360


While there has been speculation that the failure was caused by its poor cooling, the documentary "Power On: The Story of Xbox" shows that this is only partially true.

According to Leo Del Castillo, who has been a member of the Xbox hardware engineering team since 1999, the "red ring of death" was caused by broken connectors within the console components.

These are the solder balls that hold the GPU to the motherboard, and while the cause of the breakage was a heat dissipation issue, the high temperatures inside the Xbox 360 were not the only problem. Rather, according to Todd Holmdahl, Xbox's head of hardware from 1999 to 2014, the problem was that the temperature of these balls often went from hot to cold.
 

75519LI

Member
"All these people like to play video games," Holmdahl said, "so they'll turn the thing on and off, and when it turns on and off, you get all kinds of stress." Those stresses eventually caused the solder balls to break, partially severing the connection between the Xbox 360's GPU and motherboard.
 

75519LI

Member
Xbox's solution to this problem is very simple and straightforward. The company will repair every Xbox 360 sold for free, however, this is costing the company a lot of money. According to Peter Moore, the former head of Xbox, the cost of repairs and lost sales was about $1.15 billion. However, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer quickly gave Moore the money he needed to fix the problem and save the Xbox brand.
RED RING OF DEATH.png

With the "Red Ring of Death" far behind us, and in honor of the Xbox's infamous glitch, the Xbox Gear Store is now offering a poster featuring a picture of the Xbox 360 Elite power button affected by the Red Ring, with the words "Red Ring of Death" printed in the space below. " in the margin below. The poster retails for $24.99 and has a slightly glossy "fingerprint resistant" coating. It measures 18 inches (about 45.72 cm) x 24 inches (about 60.96 cm) and is about 0.25 mm thick.
 

JoeZhang

Member
Xbox's solution to this problem is very simple and straightforward. The company will repair every Xbox 360 sold for free, however, this is costing the company a lot of money. According to Peter Moore, the former head of Xbox, the cost of repairs and lost sales was about $1.15 billion. However, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer quickly gave Moore the money he needed to fix the problem and save the Xbox brand.
View attachment 11173
With the "Red Ring of Death" far behind us, and in honor of the Xbox's infamous glitch, the Xbox Gear Store is now offering a poster featuring a picture of the Xbox 360 Elite power button affected by the Red Ring, with the words "Red Ring of Death" printed in the space below. " in the margin below. The poster retails for $24.99 and has a slightly glossy "fingerprint resistant" coating. It measures 18 inches (about 45.72 cm) x 24 inches (about 60.96 cm) and is about 0.25 mm thick.
cool
 
Top