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X-Box 360 red ring of death, by Logan McDonnell. Oil paint. 2026
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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Inspired by this?
Almost certainly the reference image.
Wasn't it a problem with the heat sink disconnecting from the processor? If I'm recalling correctly you could fix this by reaffixing it with thermal paste
Ya they'd overheat and warp, breaking the connection and causing the "ring of death". I bought a few from garage sales in the past, fixed them with a heatgun, and gave them to family and friends.
I find the best idea is just to put an extra fan on them to stop them from getting too hot in the first place. My original 360 still works fine to this day because it never gets the chance to heat up with the extra fan running.
Yeah the cooling on those was bad. The towel trick (I used a stick in the fan) would make it overheat even more, reflowing the solder joints and fixing it
It would not surprise me at all if that 'flaw' was by design to sell more units.
The red ring was an extremely costly recall and repair for Microsoft ($1.1 billion) on a console they already sold at a loss to recoup with game sales. It also hurt the brand image, giving the competition a leg up.
In this case the design flaw was from them trying to skimp as much as possible on the cooling solution to reduce how much loss each console sale would bring.
Huh TIL. Strange that they didn't fix the issue with the 360 slims, because they got pretty hot quick too. I guess maybe they didn't realize how bad it was until later.
Apparently the S model was more resilient to the solder joints breaking, but still had a somewhat inadequate cooling solution. That article goes into more detail, which basically comes down to Microsoft tried to save money by doing all the design in-house, and ended up botching the whole thing, under testing it, and doing last minute changes (like the addition of a Hard Drive, which modified the airflow negatively, so they put some extra holes in it, but ultimately said "fuck it, ship it out".
To add to another comment: they failed way too early for that. If you're doing planned obsolescence, you must make sure it fails soon after the warranty period ends, not within weeks or months after the purchase.
There's a ton of old rumors and "fixes" but it was recently confirmed by Microsoft that the main issue was failure of the flip chip interposer connections caused by incorrectly engineered underfill epoxy on early batches of GPUs. This is the same issue behind Nvidia's Bumpgate and likely the PS3 YLODs.
BGA solder balls, x-clamps, thermal paste, overheating, etc were never actually a real issue. Heat gunning/towel tricking the console just warped chips enough that they temporarily made contact and would work for a little while. Only permanent fix is to replace the GPU with one made after they changed underfill epoxies.
Now that these consoles are 20+ years old there's also aging caps and whatnot to worry about too.