I guess this means we'll never see a War Thunder's Many Scandals... I was hoping you might someday compile all the cases of classified document leaks relating to this game
I was 13 and my mom drove me to a GameStop in our mall that was 30 min away to get an Xbox. I set it up as soon as I got home only for it to immediately have a red ring. Had to wait a week for my mom to drive me back to the mall to replace it. The hype of finally having one followed by the disappointment of it not working cannot be understated
I was working at a major GameSpot mall location from the early 2000s too 2009. I had so many disappointed kids, and pissed parents trying to return Xbox360s. We couldn't take back new systems unfortunately. Hardware defects had to be sent too Microsoft. Still not anywhere as much trouble for us, as the Wii release. Lines of angry people everyday! We'd tell em to come back Thursdays (delivery day), but they still would literally bring there own chair, and wait everyday!
I had something like this too. I got to play mine for a little bit but eventually the red ring happened and it was gone for several weeks. I was so disappointed.
My parents told me video games were a tool to distract the lower & middle classes from inequality in society, and wouldn't let me play them. So I didn't play video games until college.
My husband and I had a 360, but he worked 2 full time jobs (one with 24hr a shift every 3 days) and I worked up to 60 hours per week at that time. We were too busy with our demanding jobs to really get to enjoy it until a couple years after. I started a new job and my husband had medical problems that took him off 24hr shifts for a couple of years. Then, we would only buy 1-2 games a year, and even at those rare times, only on sale for half price. I really got our money’s worth out of a $25.00 USD pre-owned copy of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with almost 300 total hours with that game alone… after several years of consistent use for a few hours at a time around 3 times a week, our own “red ring of death” finally appeared. We gradually gave our games away to some friends who wanted them but were also on very tight budgets.
Those low res clips of people destroying their 360s sure take me back. I was at my cousin's house when his got red ringed. He got pissed, slammed his fist on it a few times, and it just, started working again. It still works to this day. And we still sometimes call him, "The Fonz."
@@thusnameddigital9397 It was caused by dry solder joints, at the time the recent remove of lead from solder didn't help, one fix was to make a shim (normally a filed coin) and place it under the X clamp to put pressure or bend the board slightly where the dry solder joints weren't connecting, another fix was to re-ball the mainboard by heating it up and getting the solder to melt and hopefully fixing the dry joints, by banging his fist on the console he may have bent the board slightly making the dry joints connect again.
The fun part of being a game store manager during this time was that people would hear "red ring of death", and bring their console back when their AV connention was bad, assuming the box was fucked. We would plug the thing in and show them that it worked. They would blame us for wizardry or somw shit and demand their money back. Good times.
I fixed hundreds of those. Modded just as many. It wasnt a cold solder issue. The issue was the GPU was held in place by those X springs. The box would get hot and reflow the solder, disconneting the gpu. If you removed the X spring and used nylon bolts and nuts, then reflowed it, it would work forever. Still have a few of them.
Yup I remember this. I did this to mine as well. Watched a video on it and everything. I redid the solder as a precaution but it worked perfectly after
Sorry but this is wrong. They failed not because of X clamps but because of faulty GPUs. Low Tg underfill(type of adhesive that supports the solder bumps underneath the sillicon that connect it to its interposer) was used that wasn't designed to handle the temperatures that the 90nm Xenos GPU ran at during normal operation and it would soften which should never happen and that caused the solder bumps between the GPU sillicon and the interposer to crack and lose connection as the underfill would push the sillicon die away from the substrate. After the 12th week of 2008, revised GPUs were introduced that had high Tg underfill, making them reliable and this was never an issue again. Also, there is NO way that it would "reflow" the solder, that is total BS. The reason consoles would temporary work after a reflow is because of the underfill softening again due to the temperature changes and would allow those cracked connections to be functional again and allow current to pass.
I remember working in the industry, and everyone was absolutely FLOORED by the failure rate. Acceptable failure rates for electronics are -5%. PS3 was 2%. Wii was 1%. Xbox 360 was 33%…
The guys at my local Game store were absolute legends when I had this problem. They just said "if you buy an extended warranty for £10 I'll take this one off you and give you a brand new one from the back with a 60gb HDD". Heroes Also does anyone else remember those huge fan blocks that plugged in to the back of the 360?
It makes me wonder if they knew... they bought all of the warranties right when this popped off for $8... if you got it with the console sale $9... but if you had to return it, $10. Heroes with a good business sense.
Didn't they have extended warranty and preorder quotas back then? I know my local game crazy would let me shift my preorder from one game to another, claiming the preorder bonus merch each time, without actually charging me again because the system would count it as a new preorder for their quotas. I have so many useless things. Turok necklace, Street fighter coin, Mario galaxy coin, Manhunt 2 mental hospital wristband, they would even give away the display stands they were supposed to destroy. I even got the empty 360 shell they kept on the demo stand.
being both from a family with not much money and someone who preferred Playstation anyway and still very much enjoying my PS2, and having Xbox users clown on me for it, then witnessing literally all of them lose their systems to red rings, was the most cathartic experience of my life and nothing will ever surpass that feeling ever again
@@icedo1013ya but I should also remind you Xbox got hacked like a year before this. And that wasn't the only time Microsoft would be hacked during Xbox 360s life time. Just those times were covered up where as Sony outright stated they had a problem
I remember it took only few days usually to get a new xbox free so it was mostly annoying. Did always get one month free xbox live and some points so it wasnt all bad. Even tho the quality was garbage microsoft support was 5/5 back then.
The funny thing is even with the red ring issue players still wanted to play on the console. The games were just that fun. Halo 3, Gears of War etc. A console which was the first to succesfully jumpstart an online multiplayer service where you could link up with friends. The use of LAN as a way to get people connected who didn't necessarily have internet. It was a real love hate relationship. That being said I distinctly remember always having that fear of getting a red ring of death every time I turned my console on but luckily it never came.
You left out the funniest bit: the solder issue was figured out pretty fast not by microsoft, but by gamers. A common 'fix' at the time was intentionally overheating it by wrapping it in towels and blowing hot air through it, or putting it in the oven, or even just opening the thing up and heating up the solder connections directly. The idea was to just get the solder to melt a little and reform the connections. It had a spotty success rate, but it did work sometimes and was a well known 'hack' at the time before microsoft fixed it.
I remember at that time sony had a feature on the PS3 called 'Folding@home' and it was an app that helped medical research (folding proteins or something) by using the ps3's spare computing power from the cell processor. So gamers could voluntarily contribute some computing power to help with this medical research. Xbox 360 had it's own version of folding@home, but instead gamers had to use a towel.
I fixed hundreds of these by simply replacing the thermal paste with a silver oxide based paste. I don't know why it took Microsoft an additional 10 years to admit that was the problem.
I remember seeing a couple "fixes" likes this back in the day, this fix wouldn't address the issue with the solder so would've been only temporary. I remember seeing people re-flow the solder by sticking their Xbox motherboards in the oven which could also temporarily fix the RROD
The issue is referred to as bumpgate, due to the solder bumps connecting the graphics die to the substrate wearing out and cracking over time, causing the graphics chip to no longer function. This was a hardware defect and the blame can be squarely placed on AMD (and Nvidia in the case of the PS3) for poor chip design.
Yup. This is what I did. My elite red ringed finally in about 2013-2014ish, I took it apart and replaced the thermal pad with paste, and I've never had an issue since. Until now that is, my disk drive don't read disks anymore 😢
[I want to say] back in the 2010's, my father was deployed and brought us a Ps3 and Xbox from Iraq and had them shipped over. The Xbox red ringed within a week despite the fact we barely used it, while the Ps3 survived falling down a flight of stairs, getting soggy during a hurricane, having a tv falling on it after the table it and the tv were on broke, AND a short circuit from a malfunctioning surge protector. That thing was a workhorse.
I remember videos at the time of drop and hit ‘tests’ at the different consoles, and the phat PS3 would still work after all of it compared to the Xbox and Wii. 😉
My PS3 originally belonged to my little brother and you wouldn't believe the amount of crap that things been thru ... Still works I use it all the time as a DVD player and I keep a ton of pictures and videos on it I used to use it for RU-vid but for whatever reason it doesn't connect to the internet anymore I don't know if that's something PlayStation did or maybe the system is just acting up because it's really old like original day of launch old but I don't even really care at this point I play like 5 or 6 games on it from time to time watch DVDs and backup pictures and videos with it I don't need it to work like new anymore
My 360 was a real trooper. It was strong and healthy until a year or two after the Kinect released. At that point it developed a strange condition were it would no longer read discs. The remedy was to drum roll right above the disc tray with vigor while it was attempting to read the disc. And if it was being particularly stubborn, I would have to remove the face plate and do it bareback.
That's funny. My buddy had one that you had to rotate a controller stick continuously until the disc started to read. You could hear the disc start spinning or stop depending on controller input. It made no sense but it worked for years this way. Such an odd gremlin. When I'm old(er) I'll tell them whippersnapper kids "back in my day we had to manually crank start our consoles."
Wow I was given one for free, and it had the same issue. That’s hilarious you’re the only other person I’ve heard have that issue. I ended up drawing a circle on the exact spot to hit it. I would just just the corner of the controller to hit it, you had to give it a lil arm while doing it or it wouldn’t work lol.
My favorite part of this was how "red ringed" entered the lexicon. You had nurses saying, "Sorry kids your grandpa red-ringed lol" and kids going "im going to red-ring myself". even my mechanic would tell me "sorry chief the thing's totally red-ringed"
Dude the red ring was like the defining moment in my childhood that made my mom think I was a wizard. I learned about the towel trick online and roasted my Xbox back to life. when my mom saw it turn on she was like “how?”
Every once in a while the Internet can give you some gems, my brothers truck has a well known problem with.. something electrical, I don't remember, but basically the "internet" had a fix where you just bypassed something using the fuse box, it was like 10 years ago and it's STILL working lol.
In 2006 I was fresh out of college and got my first job in the game industry as a tester for MS up in Redmond. My team were testing Xbox 360 games like Gears of War, Dead Rising, etc. We would constantly report console failures but our reports for hardware issues were ignored. I really wish they had listened to their QA team way back then. Ah well...
@@theretroroninIs it that unbelievable that out of Almost 5 Billion People, a handful of them were quality assurance testers for a billion dollar company?
@@amergingilesYeah, it is, since the QA most definitely happened in the US, thus having down your very odd number of 5 billion (since you know, if you were going for the amount of people on earth being 7,89 billion) to ~332 million.
My red ring experience was surprisingly positive. I bought a used 360 a couple of years after they came out, and it red-ringed about a week into my ownership. Luckily, it just so happened to be whatever the specific type of failure was that they were forced to warranty for three years. So, I paid $100 for a used, 2.5 year-old 360 and wound up getting an essentially brand new one a couple of weeks later.
I remember my boyfriend at the time had to send his back to the factory to be fixed right after he got it. He was PISSED. He went through Microsoft customer service instead of the retail store, and they sent a box to mail it back and everything. My 360 was fine though. But when I got the 360 S, I had to send that back to be fixed too. The process was really streamlined and communicative though, which was nice.
As someone that did in fact choose a PS3 at launch over the 360 like most of my friends and family....... i did at first feel like the fool........ but then everyone had to buy 2 more 360s while i never had to buy another ps3......... so i did laugh pretty loudly at what can i only describe as Pure Schadenfreude
Even the PS3 had it's problems. My friend's PS3 got the yellow light a few months after he bought it. The original fat 40gb versions had like a 40% failure rate. Still not as bad as the 360 though. Both consoles that generation had problems. Later PS3 models fixed the problem.
Given that I was at my friend's house playing on my 360 with him for like a month when the Playstation hack happened, and also when the PS3 was doing shit like refusing to load a Skyrim save after awhile because the save file was too big, I can absolutely say my 360 was the better choice. I never had to buy one past the first one and only had it Red Ring years after I bought it, and it was fixed for free. This is why anecdotes are useless when comparing data though, our two experiences are the same except they're on opposite sides of the coin.
@@LethalJizzle I bought a 360, a later model that was supposed to be "fixed." Well mine didn't Red Ring of Death but it would just overheat and shut off after 10minutes. Since it wasn't the death ring it wasn't under warranty. I bought a 360 cause it was cheaper and at the time had more of the games I wanted to play (and games like GTA4 ran better on the 360). PS3 definitely came back hard in the second part of that generation and once they dropped the price I picked up a PS3. I still don't trust Xbox consoles and now that I have a gaming PC I can play the Xbox games on my PC instead. (And now Sony exclusives are coming to PC so I guess I made the right choice).
What I remember even more than the red ring was that if your friend even bumped the table or your dog or cat touch the 360 it would laser burn a circle on your disc and destroy it. Still incredible memories of tf2, cod4, assassins creed 1, dark souls, gears of war 1, and more for hours and hours lol
A "friend" decided to show off how you could turn the 360 sideways. His console, but MY game was in it. Absolutely fucked the disc and he refused to replace it because I didn't cause a scene but instead asked him to replace it the next day.
Shockingly, when I eventually got a 360, it was the Halo 3 model. It was shared between me and my 2 stepsiblings and it lasted well into the Elite/Slim's release before finally red ringing; we took it to a Best Buy and the tech there was baffled that it lasted so long with so much use before finally kicking the bucket. Real shame I was never able to get everything off it; lost a lot of custom Halo maps and gamemodes as a result.
Excellent video! The Xbox 360 became very famous in Latin America and here in Brazil, where there was no service that allowed consoles to be repaired. In this case, we started with non-formal processes, the most famous was "rebailing" which cost almost 70% of the value of the console (which was VERY expensive here) and didn't keep it working for almost 2 months. I used the cheap and so-called "mod-Opalla" on my 360, which consisted of using clips to hold paper with a eraser on one end, pressing the memories onto the board. Almost 20 years later and it still works. PS: The "so-called mod-Opala" had this name because there was a very famous car in Brazil in the 80s and 90s here with this name (it's a "child" of the American Impala), and this car had a problem where the exhaust "hit" the body a lot of the car making an unbearable noise inside the vehicle due to the vibration, and to solve it it was necessary to attach a piece of rubber under the exhaust, holding it in place...yeah, this is Brazil 🤣
Idk if this was a common thing, but a “fix” for the red ring of death was wrapping the console in a towel and quite literally let it cook, sounded like BS but it was worth trying instead of just dumping it (since refunds and returns are a joke) to my surprise it worked and let me play for 3 months more until the console died for good
@@sheshin Haha, some friends here used the "towel mod" in an even more violent way. After leaving the console inside the towel until it warmed up, they placed it in the freezer and left it there for some time. They said at the time that this "adjusted" the spaces between the weld points that cracked due to overheating. The result was the same as in your case, it worked for 2 months and then they died. There is a wonderful video on RIP Felix channel, which shows not only what caused these problems on the X360, but also how they were super common on the first Playstation 3, the one that looked like George Foreman Grill.
I was one of the luckiest 360 owners ever. Got 1 single OG pro model and it somehow lasted several years before finally giving out one day. By that time Microsoft had already gone through the ringer with the 360 failures and had streamlined their repair process. Shipped my console off and got it back with a shiny new Falcon mainboard and it continued on for years after until the disc drive shat the bed
My father bought the house the Xbox 360 a month after it’s release and I was so excited! I remember the first day we set it up, my dad and I played street fighter and halo for hours. This was like a routine for the week that followed up but less than two weeks the red rings plagued us. I tried everything I could find in forums but no help. That was the last time I ever got to play video games with my dad. I will always hate Microsoft for that
I was maybe 8 or 9 when my older brother got his white Xbox 360. So many fond memories with that console, countless hours playing split screen Halo Reach. When he moved out to college, he left it with me, and I still play it occasionally today. I’m 24, and I really feel lucky to have a 360 that’s survived this long.
By the way, the towel trick genuinely worked. I had mine RRoD and brought it back to life six times, the trick was to leave it tightly wrapped for about 30 - 45 minutes in a thick towel and then, after unplugging the system, picking it up and dropping (NOT THROWING) it from a distance of about three to four feet directly parallel from the floor on a carpeted/soft surface. My theory, and I have no idea if its real or not I'm beyond caring, was that the RRoD was caused by the system overheating and some chip inside slightly displacing. The heat freed up those slots, and dropping it forced the chip back into place. After I left it unplugged and it cooled down it would work for an average of a couple months to a year or so. By the way, mine still works - six RRoDs later. Lmao, Microsoft, maybe they should've stocked up on some towels!
Problem was caused by dry soldering, combined with terrible airflow the heat would make it stop working, but if you did the towel strategy, the reason it works is because you're aiming to melt the thermal paste/solder itself so that it covers the connection again by melting
I'm sceptical that throwing the console actually helped with fixing the connections. The graphics chip is not in a socket but directly soldered to the board, which is completely flat. When the solder balls underneath the chip are fully melted the only thing that would be keeping it in place is the heat sink pressing directly down on top of the chip. It does not sound like a random impact would help here. I feel it's more likely the first step just re-forms the solder balls that have cracked by the heating/cooling cycles. I'm just guessing here, though.
The proper fix would have been a complete BGA chip recalling operation, which meant taking apart the whole thing, using precise temp controlled hot air or infrared rework station to lift the GPU chip off the board without damaging the pads on the pcb, *completely cleaning off and replacing the garbage leadfree solder with the good stuff - leaded solder* ,and reflowing it back on. It would be a guaranteed fix, unless the issue was under the lid of the chip itself, which - surprise, surprise - had the VRAM soldered on the chip base - with the same shitty leadfree solder. Gotta love the enviroturds for forcing this trash solder upon us all…..
@@asakayosapro While I agree that lead-free solder is not great, I don't agree that something I bought for entertainment should be able to poison waterways. Given that most modern electronics use lead-free solder and don't seem to have this problem I think I would blame Microsoft's thermal design instead. That unfortunately means that there are no easy fixes (someone here said that replacing the thermal compound helped, but that's just a anecdote).
I remember as a kid I found a method where you shove toothpicks into the grate on the top or bottom (can't remember which) to fix it... And no word of a lie it actually worked for me and fixed my red ring. I put it in on a specific spot and felt something just pop into place it was really weird.
The reason for selling the remote control for the original xbox, if I remember right, was because that's how they avoided having to pay the license fee for the MPEG2 decoder on every single xbox, which would have increased costs, so instead the license was attached to the DVD Playback kit (even though the software was already on the hard drive). Pretty sure they were making a loss on those consoles (at least at first), so obviously they didn't want to have to eat the cost for a feature that many people might not have cared about.
I was looking for this comment. My friend explained this to me back in the early 2000s when I was baffled as to why a remote and little plugin thing was needed to play DVDs.
The Gamecube may not have sold well but it was the hardiest little console I've ever owned. Survived a drop onto a hardwood floor and kept working like new for years until I gave it away like an idiot.
Me and my cousins intentionally abused one of our gamecubes just to put test it's limit. We never found the limit. We chucked it down the stairs. Tossed it upwards onto the patio(probably threw it 7-8 feet up in the air and just let it drop onto pavement) And for our grande finale we spiked it into the trampoline, it bounced off and hit the side of a log before landing on grass. I'm pretty sure nearly 20 years later(holy fuck time really does fly) that thing will still work if they can dig it out of their closet.
Crazy enough me and my brothers played absolutely so much on the gamecube that we went through 2 of them, which is insane considering how hardy that lil cube was. We didn't abuse the console or anything either, just 3 dudes who really wanted to play gamecube games one after another everyday for years.
They absolutely knew what was wrong with the console, they didn't care. They thought it was worth releasing it even defective and then just replace them as needed. Their only concern was getting the console out before anyone else.
@@JimBob-jr5up MS was absolutely wrong, it costed them over 1 billion dollars. That is a very hard number to visualize, and remember, MS was selling these console at a loss and making up for the loss with exclusive games and Xbox live subscriptions (much like sony of course). I would be shocked if MS actually turned a profit off of Xbox 360 quite frankly.
It deserved to be the death of their franchise but the fan boy was their saving grace. I dont buy the bs that none of them could figure out the problem and their early phone support was trained in denial of refunds. You could also get black screen of death without the red and that was something they refused to refund.
@@jamesmcleod2415 And yet they still took over the console market. I could even make the argument that all those broken 360s created for a secondary modders market, that still helped them. So, sure, it cost them quite a bit but they became, and i think still are 2 gens later, the most sold consoles, at least for north america and europe. So i will say it again. Hard to say they where wrong.
3:00 YIKES! Was the video researched? The PlayStation could play DVDs. The PS2 had a Blue Ray Player! That was the kicker! A Blue Ray disk would hold 10x more data than a standard DVD. It was also Backwards compatible. Meaning you could still play your PlayStation games, using the old Memory cards. That was a huge selling point back in the days before digital downloads.
Technically the warranty they had was illegal it's just that the FTC won't make a point of doing anything about it and of course, whose going to go to court on that fact when anyone daring enough to break a warranty probably knows a way to fix it.
19:37 This is false, the 360 never had problems with bad ventilation or overheating. The problem was the GPU chips from launch to mid 2008 had defective under fill. 360s manufactured post mid 2008 are very reliable consoles
In about 2008, all my friends had xbox 360s and I desperately wanted to join them. I asked my dad for one and he said "do you know what a Wii is?" The rest is history.
I bought a 360 floor model from the local Toys R Us for like, $100 below MSRP. Two months later, it red-ringed, and Microsoft replaced it with a brand new one that I still have to this day.
So in the early aftermath of the red ring incident I had an... acquaintance who was kind nutty, but great at repairing electronics. He told me that he was certain that it was the solder causing the problems. He claimed Sony had their hands in the creation of laws around lead free solder, using environmental saftey as an excuse, but really it was about planned obsolescence, with Sony knowing the problems with lead free solder cracking, and could more easily design electronics that stop working after 3 years.
Your friend is absolutely correct. The reason is that while lead-free solder is technically more durable, it also requires significantly higher heat to properly form a connection. Many lead-free solders have melting points that are too high to safely use on electronics without an intermediate to insulate the actual components. It also means that if it cracks due to heat cycling, it won't be able to melt itself back into place without overheating to the point of frying itself. This leads us to the second major problem: "lead free" doesn't always specify what chemistry they replace the lead with, so you can have everything from silver oxide (best option) to antimony to compounds of mercury being used to lower the melting point enough to where it's safe for use on electronics.
@@roymcdre9180look at the average amount of PS2s users bought. I had 3. they were designed to break. and the controllers have gotten worse too. DS4s last not even a sixth of the time a DS2 or SixAxiS
Man the ps3 was that generations Dreamcast. I dropped my ps3 on straight asphalt from about 5 feet. Which landed right on the corner where the power button is. The glass around the power button is cracked, and I can see a bit of the internals. Regardless I have that thing plugged up and it still runs in 2023. These things are honesty the GOAT of consoles IMO
It is interesting it took them so long to admit that it was the lead free solder, there are articles from 2007 that speculate that as the cause and even narrow it down to the GPU. I personally had 5 different 360s over a course of a few years. The last one was an Arcade model and it never failed. I also lost a few games to the disc tray, it would eat them up.
it's crazy too cuz to the best of my knowledge, lead free solder is way more expensive. I used to use it when I worked in my grandpa's plumbing shop because there was a vested interest in keeping lead out of water pipes.
@@bunnerkinslead free solder is mandatory in Europe. It's illegal to put lead in your solder as it eventually goes to landfills and incinerators. They've figured out a good formula by now - lead-free solder is fine - but I suppose there were some problems when it was new.
It's not so much the lead free solder but the wave soldering technique. I imagine MS didn't get their equipment calibrated well enough. Or it was just faulty. Japanese companies had the same issue when they used wave soldering for commercial hifi in the early 90's.
When I ran into the issue it was more or less confirmed by repair shops by that point, late 2007. Honestly, this is the first I've heard that Microsoft was unaware that was the cause.
Bought a used 360 off a friend about 15 years ago now, regular model, 120 gb hdd module, controller and memory unit for 100 bucks. Ended up running flawlessly all day, every day, grinding on Halo then CoD then Destiny as a NEET for years before the disk drive finally went and it became my RU-vid Xbox. Really felt lucky on that one.
Yeah definitely called it: RoHS. The problem isn't just that lead-free solder is inflexible and prone to corrosion (and a phenomenon known as "tin whiskers"), it's that it has different flow characteristics: you can't treat tin solder the same as lead solder because the tin solder requires a longer, higher max temperature flow curve, but too many early adopters of RoHS standards just treated it like lead solder (which used a faster, cooler flow process) and so it didn't flow properly. Also, some of the early tin solder compositions were less than ideal so they'd fail even under ideal flow conditions. This was a huge problem in the mid '00s and into the 2010s, especially noticeable in video cards.
I used to work in a microelectronics manufacturing facility and I got to learn about the manufacturing side of Microsoft's experienced, and observed, failures that you mentioned when covering the RoHS (lead-free) directive. Here are some notes I can share to explain in a little more detail: - The failures Microsoft experienced could have likely been avoided had they not cut corners and ran through what is called an "underfill" process. What an underfill is, and looks like, is a secondary manufacturing step to the components being placed on and soldered to the board. The primary manufacturing workflow would be loading the palletized unpopulated (circuit)boards (palletized means they're put into a fixture that ferries them through the machines and gives some buffer so the machine can grab the edge without affecting placement locations). The first step is to go through a stencil printer, which looks/functions a lot like a screen printer for t-shirts if you need something to look up. The boards would then go through the pick-and-place (PnP) machines, which place all the electrical components possibly handled by the units, then run through a reflow oven (which runs a temperature profile to ensure a quality solder joint for each component placed). The secondary process that they DID NOT do, underfill, runs the boards through a stage that gently coats them in a film of adhesive, then cures this adhesive. This step would have kept the components from being able to loosen/desolder and cause "generic hardware failures" in the machine. The next process would have been placing any additional components, such as ones that have to be hand soldered due to being through-hole components (like most electrolytic capacitors), or units that would need to have their thermal paste applied (like the heatsinks). These can be handled by modern PnP machines, but those machines remain incredibly expensive and sometimes it is cheaper to just pay someone to do this. - You likely knew this when making the joke, but in the event you didn't, the RoHS solder paste is technically less tasty than the leaded; lead tastes sweet for a metal. Old pewter dish and cookware used to occasionally contribute to the sweet tastes of food before the negative effects of lead were known. - Additional note is that most leaded solder (paste) is a ratio of 63/37 SnPb (Tin Lead) by weight. RoHS is often the SAC305 alloy, though there are many others, which is typically 96.5% tin, 3% silver, and 0.5% copper. Going back to the reflow step I mentioned in my above chunk of text, SAC305 solder paste has to go through a reflow oven at a much hotter temperature with a more aggressive, and difficult to control, ramping function than SnPb solder paste. SnPb solder paste is eutectic at about 183C, SAC305 is at 220C. What eutectic means is that instead of melting from a solid to liquid, the phase change occurs in almost the same instant (again, SnPb does this in a much tighter frame than SAC305). so to ramp from room temperature in a fabrication facility of likely 22C-25C, it really matters especially when you have to ease it in as using a temperature profile that maximizes temperature immediately will ruin your solder joint (either boil it and cause air pockets, burn it, or create a frail/brittle solder joint). What idea reflow profiles typically look like are if you took the typical plot diagram with a steeper falling action than rising action, and had a modulated cutoff so that it was like a slightly flattish during the part where it breaks the eutectic point (look up reflow profiles if you'd like). I spent years developing these profiles for various semi-finished medical products with test profile boards that I developed by hand with probes measuring all across the boards and placeholder heatsinks to make sure someone's cochlear implant, RNS epilepsy implant, incontinence sacral neuromodulator implant (AND MORE!) would not fail/RROD post implant and activation. - All of this is to say those people that were suggesting to wrap the Xbox 360 in a towel or shove it in an oven weren't totally wrong. They were doing at-home reflowing and potentially resoldering their components to the circuit board. Feel free to ask questions if anyone reads this, I have tons of information/stories.
I had the RRoD 3-4 times. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of sitting down after a long work week, expecting to finally game with the boys, and power up to a black screen and red ring.
I almost feel bad my 360 never red ringed. Almost 20 years on and it still works. Hope this doesn't jinx it next time I get nostalgia and try to use it.
I played the OG Gears of War semi-professionally and went through 9 360’s with the RROD. I was a high school student who had no money, but sold everything I could scrounge (plus a little sponsor money) to buy a second 360 just so I didn’t have downtime. I once got the RROD the same day that I got my 360 back from service! It was a total nightmare
This video brought me back to some of the best parts of my childhood. The PS1 and PS2 were absolute GOAT consoles that carried my childhood. Thankfully when I got an xbox, and all the xbox's I've had since never experienced the red ring of death. Cool video👍
I remember when I was little my dad's xbox got the red ring, and then the next day when I took one of my games to my friends house his Xbox left one of those perfect circle scratches on my disc, the ones that are literally fatal to a disc game. Shit had me tight
Yeah, they did that when a disc was spinning in the drive and you tilted the Xbox upright or laid it back on its side. I did it on purpose once, they had a warning sticker about it but I was a dumb kid and just wanted to see what'd happen.
@@JohnDoeWasntTaken I swear they used to sometimes just do it regardless. Had a copy of dead rising that got fucked cause of it, and I nearly never touched my Xbox other than to turn on and swap discs
@@JohnDoeWasntTaken that was on the Xbox 360 slim it didn't have that special covering over the disc drive to allow a disc to keep spending while the consul is being moved
I have to give Microsoft my respect. I had a 360 and and it worked perfectly... until it one day got the RRoD. I called up MS for support and gave the tech the serial number of my 360. The tech said my 1 year warranty expired a week ago. They replaced it anyway, even though they didnt have to.
I literally got the red ring of death three times in a row. I sent it in two times, before I just bought a new console, because those return boxes DID take weeks to come! I remember starting to save for a new console after the second occurrence.
It damn sure did. Once my brother got back from his 2007 tour to Afghanistan he gave me a memory card that was filled with footage, one specifically was of him and his buddies destroying all their 360's with artillery and .50 cal rounds😅
My 360 was on life support for two years with the towel trick. I wrapped it up like a baby and prayed to the MW2 Gods to allow me in the halls of 10th prestige
God, what a time it was. My mom had bought mine in 07 with Halo 3 at Best Buy. The best buy warranty she had bought ran out by 1 month by the time my 360 elite got red ring. I had heard horror stories about people sending their consoles to the repair center, so I took mine to a local game store and paid to have it fixed. 70 bucks and a week later I had my 360 back again.
I can remember being in Australia in 2008 and I was the only kid in school who didn’t have a Xbox 360 But by the end of the summer - basically no one at school had one The summer there was on average 40 degrees and stuck inside lots of my friends just played Xbox until the extreme heat fucked their units. Felt pretty good
@@DrawciaGleam02 parents refused to buy me one - told me that if I wanted it I had to work for it so I got a paper round that paid $25 a week and by about late 2009 I had enough money to buy one along with a couple of games - namely Fallout 3 and GTA.
@@VinnyUnion not really. 2008-09 was a difficult time for my family - money was tight and any spare money my parents had was banked due to the GFC. Plus - as a teenager - my parents were teaching me that if I wanted something I had to work and save for it and if I wanted it bad enough then I would do so.
I always think about the "life hack" of wrapping the console in a towel while turned on. Creating a superheated environment, I wonder if that's why this method "worked", albeit temporarily.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 yeah and we know that now, but when people first started doing it they didn’t know about the weak soldering. So what was their mentality? 😂
AMD bought ATI Technologies (a Canadian company mind you) in 2006, and continued using the ATI brand well into 2010 when the ATI name was finally retired in favour of just AMD. They had been contracted by both Nintendo and Microsoft to develop graphics chips for the GameCube and Xbox 360 respectively, while Sony contracted Nvidia for their PS3 graphics chips (the OG Xbox also utilized a custom Nvidia GPU).
I remember my red ring of death. I was able to fix it using a YT tutorial. It worked great for a few months until I got the 2 red lights of death. This time I couldn’t fix it so I taught it to fly
LOL ps3 blue light of death was the same suffering. Also the issue with both the consoles and some GPU's from that era is the underfill used by TSMC it got too soft when hot which allowed cracking and breaking of the conections between the die and substrate. That last is also the reason that a reball of the chip often only lasted a few months.
The difference is the BLoD was much much rarer because Sony know how to make consoles and didn't rush to get the PS3 out first because they know what they're doing, unlike Xbox.
I remember having the red ring on the 360 arcade while playing fable the lost chapters. Shut it off immediately, and started playing without any problems again.
It’s something of a unique experience for the Red Ring to be so infamous everyone (including peeps like myself who only had a PS3) forgot about the Yellow Light of Death for the PS3
to be fair, the yellow light of death was so much smaller in comparison and only affected less then 10% of consoles (still alot) while the red ring affected over 48% of xbox consoles and some people even more the once.
It's because PlayStation fanboys were salty as shit that Gen. Nobody wanted to chime in that Sony's console was faulty as well. The 'Yellow Light' issue was a far more serious issue. You couldn't just repaste the GPU; you had to get it professionally reballed/refluxed (which can only ever be done once or twice in its life).
@@redslate that's just not true, no one is fanboy enough to take a faulty console that wouldn't work, it's an objective FACT that Xbox 360 consoles kept breaking at the rate they did, And that PS3 consoles were still faulty but not even CLOSE to the degree that the Xbox consoles were, to this day, playstation has preserved it's sturdy reputation from this. Don't be a console fanboy and don't suck Microsoft's dick.
@redslate who cares🤦♂️ you're 10 x more likely to need a new xbox than a ps3. Xbox was faulty Junk. I never knew anyone with yellow light but knew 15 people who had to buy whole new 360s
I remember going into a FuncoLand and they said they kept having to replace the store console because it would overheat and stop working. Did they not have an emergency poweroff to keep the processor from melting onto the motherboard?
I recall my old 360 red ringing, it was super confusing back then since I was so young at the time. I don't recall how but we got it working again (probably had it sent in , I suppose) and it worked smoothly ever since.
Man seeing a almost history video on a console gen i grew up with is surreal, like a weird look back at what still sometimes feels new and current to me
I had friends back in the day that no joke went through 10 360s. Those days it was almost a 100% chance that someone you knew had a 360 currently shipped out to MS. It's not something I had to deal with myself since I only got a 360 later with the black Elite. It still works fine to this day,
There is a group of people that solved this issue. The RROD and the PS3 YLOD were actually the same issue. TSMC was contracted by Nvidia and ATI for the graphics processor. However both sony and microsoft chose to cheap out on the substrate material. The ball grid array that attaches the die to the substrate breaks from thermal cycling (not the BGA that attaches the substrate to the main board.) This is why overheating the consoles works for a short time. If you look at Sony’s console history they redesigned that GPU a few times to address the issue. But they only band-aided the issue until right before the slim came out when they just redesigned the GPU completely.
Correction: It wasn't the substrate material at fault. It was low tg underfill that was used to support the solder bumps. It was a industry wide issue at that time and other devices were affected by this too.
2007 I caught the red ring of death 1 time. I was uploading a music CD and caught that way. And they sent me a new Xbox. I broke the seal too and they couldn't tell it was broken. You break that seal. They not sending you a new Xbox. It's been working ever since.
The YLOD Yellow Light of Death was something that was fairly common on the early ps3's so it wasn't just the 360 that had issues, I'm not sure if it was to the same extent on the ps3 though.
@@misham6547 Both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 use lead-free solder, which _is_ failure-prone under extreme heat, *but* most 360 hardware issues were due to a fail-safe ("red-ring") involving inadequate cooling. In nearly every case, this error prevented further damage (to the solder for instance) from occurring. The root cause for 360s overheating was poorly applied, cheap thermal paste. This could easily be remedied by replacing the thermal compound and remounting the heatsink (preferably without the equally cheap x-clamp). This differs significantly from the cooling issues of the PS3, which make it exponentially more likely to crack the lead-free solder and/or melt flux. Changing the thermal compound on a PS3 isn't nearly as likely to be as successful or long-term a repair. What caused the permanent death of most Xbox 360 consoles were retarded teenagers wrapping their sensitive electronics in a God damn towel and creating makeshift ovens (multiple times over in some instances). It "worked" the first couple times, right? 🤤 All this did was heat what little thermal paste remained to a point where it might melt, spread, and make more contact with the cooler for a short period of time. Of course, this also *cooked* both the remaining thermal compound and *every* *single* *component* inside the console. Let's not excuse poor design choices, but, objectively, the Xbox 360 issue is, by its nature, significantly less destructive than that of the PS3.
