Red Ring Repair success

[tbone4321]

Hi,
how long does the RROD repair last for on average. My best result was 6 months after using the bolts and washer repair kit. Anyone have it last any longer?

[CoFree]

yea
there are some that are working after 2 years
but
there is not many as far as i know
and im sure it has to do with use
its just a matter of time before it rrod again
until you take the chip off (reball) and use good solder(with lead) its just a matter of time.

[moonknight]

Best success I have had with RROD is to send it back to M$. Gotta be less than 3 years old and not look like it has ever been opened or tampered with.

[tbone4321]

Fair comments indeed,.....Has the cause ever been agreed. I was told by an insider from MS that, rather than subcontract the design of the processor/GPU to an independent 3rd party design firm, Microsoft instead decided to design key elements in-house with inevitable results. That being the case,....its an inherently flawed product,.....hence the 3 year warranty. I know its sorted now, but there was a lot of inventory in the system that is still working its way through.

[CoFree]

.Has the cause ever been agreed.

we have known for a long time why it was happening
to make as green a console as they could
M$ used LEADLESS solder on the cpu/gpu
it does not handle the hot/cold on/off as good as solder with lead

[tbone4321]

here is what I heard........

During the Design Automation Conference, Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, disclosed that it all begun with a single Microsoft's decision aiming to cut design costs for their Xbox 360 graphics chip.

According to Bryan Lewis, the epidemic happened because "Microsoft wanted to avoid an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) vendor", so they designed their own graphics chip and sent it directly to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing for production.

Normally, semiconductor chips are designed on two stages. The first of them is the Schematic design where engineers draw a symbolic representation of the circuit. This should have been done by Microsoft. The second stage is PCB Layout design. In this stage, the abstract representation of the circuit is converted to real life Printed Circuit Board through a delicate and complex design process. Apparently, Microsoft decided to design its own PBC, but failed and ended up with an RROD epidemic.

[HaGGardSmurf]

Live and learn I guess. The newer mobo revisions have better cpu + gpu's and the slim's basically do not red ring...

The main issue is what cofree is talking about. Lead free solder has big issues with the heating and cooling of the 360. (Specifically the older motherboard's as the chips produce more heat)

Replacing the solder with leaded (reballing) is the only real way to solve the problem on older/rrod board's. You can do a band-aid fix (xclamp, reflow) but they will fail eventually.

[CoFree]

as much as i hate to give them credit for anything
the gpu was stable.
but the solder used to make the connection to the mobo was crap