Hi,

There is a speech on doing cooling enhancements for xbox 360 for a while, there are like 5 methods that most people agree on and there is a local guy that can do it for me, I wondered if its necessary or advisable to do so. By the way my console is a "Falcon". He is gonna do X-clamp, shroud mod, making my fans 12v, cut the fence behind the console and one other thing.

I wonder if those actually help my console live longer.

-tnx

 

you shouldnt really do anything permanent to the system if you need to send it back to MS if a problem becomes unfixable
the x-clamp can be removed, the shroud mod might be removable as long as you just use to tape or something and not melt it into the other piece
I suggest not clipping the fence as I never heard of anyone doing that to improve cooling

 

well it fixed the no video error (well it wasn't an error, there was just no video output anymore) on my 360 (I got a Rrod 4 months before but new thermal past fixed that for a while...)

but if it aint broke, dont fix it

 

I probably posted something like this before but it is my understanding rrod (and the similar faults that have since "replaced" it) is mainly a creep problem associated with the ball grid array (what the CPU and graphics use to connect to the board) which is not helped by a badly supported board (the motherboard bends which why a few of the better guides to repairing a 360 will tell you to support it) and weakly held clamps (there is a reason the clamps are replaced) as well as whiskers ( http://www.cinemag.biz/rohs.html ).
Bad joins/bad flow due to lack of lead in the solder (what the heating part of the RROD fixes aim to sort and towel fix is a poor version of) are also present in similar devices.
On top of this you have the usual computer chip issues (electromigration http://www.dwpg.com/content.php?contid=2&artid=68 and the like) but that really goes without saying.

A returned RROD 360 will often have an extra fan and a couple of replaced capacitors, some read into this that it fixes a fault while others would say litigation dodging (I favour a bit of both and neither).

Of course you also have a near complete lack of a widespread study into 360s (or at least a published one; I would like to think any internal research would be published widely enough to be leaked). A lot of what exists is based on small numbers and inferred from people fixing 360s and similar tech (graphics cards also fail by similar methods).

Heating issues are always present when it comes to high performance electronics but by and large these are minor compared to the ones above and it is usually user error that causes overheating (sticking it in a place without much airflow usually with a justification like "my PS2 worked fine there for years").

Onto pre-emptive fixing; your aim appears to be keep it for as long as possible and resale, if any, will be to someone who appreciates the issues so we are down to purely technical merits.
I would not like to call xclamp replacement; one the one hand it should hold things better, on the other creep rate is proportional to strain (which the new xclamp increases) which may not be a problem worth considering on a good BGA but a bad one (which many are) may cause failure. That is pure hypothesising and I have not done (and to my knowledge nor has anyone else) any tests on 360s or a suitable analogue with a sample size that could be considered good.

Long story short nobody has much of an idea about it all and there is as much pointless discussion and misinformation with good stuff buried in there as there is about bannning. I think I will leave it at keeping electronics cool is almost invariably a good idea and MS decided to either not know or not build electronics using accepted knowledge about how to build electronics, alas games are nice and they have some nice games.

 

No.

Keepin' it short for you.

 

as far as Ive seen MS just replaces the whole mobo now with a newer one with both the gpu and cpu on 65nm die's

when a new mobo wasnt out they just added another a bigger heatsink in

 

raulpica is right, RROD is completely random, heck some of my friends have had theirs for 2 years and they are fine, others for like 9 months and then it dies. Great console, just ruined by idiots that have no idea how to design a damn case, and choose the right hardware for the job. I dont see the logic behind inter-coolers, and 12v fans and such. Its just something you'll have to live with basically, heck if RROD does occur it would be easier to just repair it yourself, then do all the preparations to prevent it in the first place.