West Virginian Joystiq.com super blogger and Monte Cristo sandwich fanboy Justin McElroy has authored a series of stunning posts that bring the rising trend of a disturbing Xbox 360 error to light.
The E74 error is caused when the "ANA" image scaler chip fails, overheats or there is serious AV connection problem. The hot air flow from the CPU and GPU goes right over the location of the ANA chip so it might be slowly cooked by normal use.
An Xbox 360 that is suffering an E74 error will have the lower-right quadrant of the Ring of Light flash on the front on the console and a multiple languages error message may display that will read "E74. System Error. Contact Xbox Customer Support." or the screen will simply glitch out and display a feild of video snow.
The E74 errors can show up during game play causing the game to lock up. It might go away after the system has a chance to cool off but some Xbox 360 consoles will have chronically reocurring E74 errors making them un-usable and un-fun. This sucks for everyone involved. It sucks for the gamers and it sucks for Microsoft since they want you to have a working console and to buy more Xbox games.
This sucks since videogames are supposed to be fun. Users should not have to worry about getting an E74 or RROD hardware failure error. In my RROD insider articles I pointed out that the Xbox 360 has a fault intolerant electronic hardware design. That basically means that once there is a failure in one part of the design the entire system will stop.
The more disturbing trend is that this errors seems to be affecting Falcon motherboard based Xbox 360 system. The Falcon system has a cooler 65nm CPU and a hot 90nm GPU. The newer Jasper motherboard has both a 65nm CPU and 65nm GPU and hopefully it won't succumb to either the E74 or RROD but only time will tell.
The E74 Error is the annoying cousin of the RROD since while it is not a direct failure of the CPU. GPU or RAM but it is caused by the high amount of heat eventually damaging the ANA chip causing it to fail. While it is true that the rate of RROD errors are dropping but it might bring other hardware failures to light such as the E74 that we never saw because the spot light was on the RROD.
The ANA chip is a pretty cool feature when it is working correctly. It will take the native rendered resolution of the game image created by the GPU and scale it to whatever resolution your display is set to. This allows the Xbox 360 run games on a vast variety of resolutions while leaving the GPU and CPU free to render the game. The PS3 has to do that through software and will have inconstant rendering performance and different resolutions. It was added to the Zephyr motherboard and is included on the Falcon, Opus and Jasper motherboards. The original Xenon Xbox 360 motherboard had an surface mounted scaler chip but since that model is so prone to RROD deaths they were much more likely to have RROD related errors than the E74.
There is a YouTube video I found of some nerds attempting to trigger E74 errors by putting stress on the ANA chip causing it to trip and then attempt to temporarily fix it by putting a stack of quarters wrapped in electrical tape on top of it to act as a conductive heat conduit upward away from the chip. It sucks that there is a bunch of snake oil scammers trying to sell E74 Hardware repair guides on the net.
Yesterday I thought it might be due to the change in memory location in the Falcon revision 2 motherboard that Ben Heck first noticed. They had moved the RAM from the underside of the motherboard to the top when they started the batch of Falcon's that included the 60-gig hard drive in early summer 2008. There is a theory that the rise in E74 errors might be due to the new NXE software but I don't think so. Check out the Google trends for "E74" it looks like it started spiking after the changes to the Falcon memory in summer 2008. The problem existed before the launch of the NXE.
There was a recent post on the Consumerist called Sorry your Xbox 360 isn't the right kind of broken. The poster claimed that Microsoft Customer Support claimed that the E74 was not the same as the RROD Core Digital Failure so it was not covered under the extended warrantee. Microsoft has just as recently as today gone on the record and stated that a shipping box or "Coffin" is always an option and it looks like they are going to do the right thing and treat chronic e74 failing Xbox system like they cover RRODed systems. Hopefully people will get new motherboards instead of just a new or applied ANA chip.
I considered asking Microsoft PR about this I know I am going to get the same RROD statement about changes to hardware and improving quality assurance that they have been saying for years now. What is really sad about the RROD and E74 is that Microsoft can't talk about it in detail because of legal and competitive reasons.
Microsoft's official statement on the E74 error that they sent to Joystiq.com is:
They have a tech document about the error here."E74 is a general hardware error on Xbox 360 indicated by a single red flashing light in the Xbox Ring of Light and an error message visible on the television. This error is unrelated to the three flashing red lights error and there is not a single root cause. We encourage anyone who receives this error to contact Xbox Customer support through http://www.xbox.com/support" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; or 1-800-4-MY-XBOX. The majority of customers who own Xbox 360 consoles continue to have a terrific experience from their first day, and continue to, day in and day out."
Microsoft made a lot of a Falcon based Xbox 360 and there are still bunch of them on the store shelves. We don't know if the Jasper will be more resistant to the E74 error and we don't know if more Falcon based Xbox 360 system will continue to get the E74 hardware failures. The weird thing is that we can't tell if the E74 is a 1 in 100,000 failure or 1 in 1,000 and they all started posting on the internet. Everyone has such a bad taste in their mouth from the RROD epidemic that MS better be very careful how to deal with e74 issue. I never got the RROD until I did and that was the last thing my first Xbox 360 ever did. Video games are supposed to be fun and having to worry about premature and sudden death of your game system is without a doubt not fun.
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Well guys
how long do you think M$ will lie and deny this one is a problem.
