Fragile Part of Xbox 360 Found? Thermal Design Expert Investigates

Microsoft Corp. has logged a huge 1.06 billion USD (130 billion yen) charge due to warranty claims for its "Xbox 360" game console. This is a frightening amount of money for engineers engaged in product design.

Amid current circumstances, where consumer electronics manufacturers often recall their products, this is no longer someone else's affair. We would definitely like to know what caused Microsoft to log such a large cost.

Microsoft itself, however, refuses to reveal details of the malfunction that has forced the company incur huge expenses. So, we can only investigate the cause by ourselves. Nikkei Electronics thereby attempted to analyze the Xbox 360's heat radiation system, having a thermal design expert cooperate.

[ENNO]

why the fuk did they know this was going on so long(nearly 2 years)and now only start to manufacture this new thermal design.....money is in the minds of the greedy i suppose...

[ElementX]

They're spending more than they're making by waiting so long.

[BISHOP-BRASIL]

MS will never public assume that the 360 have a design flaw.

Don't matter if anybody find the source of the problem, MS will deny, cause if they assume, anybody with a 360 could complain to MS 'OK, so you sell me a defective hardware. I want another without the problem or my money back'. Because if you make a defective product, you legal obligation is to fix if possible, or trade, if not. And a design flaw is a not possible to fix case.

It even could tie MS's hands to make a new console without the flaw. If they change the design and gets proven that the previous design is defective, anybody can sue MS as in the previous case.

The only way to MS get that Falcon thing to the light is making minors and discrete changes, like 65nm, better material to support heat, and there it goes... Once it get some time around, without more RROD, MS can make then serious changes to the design placing it as a evolve, just like PS2 comes to PS2Slim.

[AllroundGamer]

could the fragile part be the xbox itself? ;)

[DirtyRat]

we've already seen this info ages ago, it is nothing new

[dale1]

it gets hot very hot well you can always cook on it

[CourtesyFlush]

If I recall, wasn't one criticism leveled at the original Xbox that it was a very big, chunky black box? I think Western gamers didn't mind the design or size so much, but in many areas it was seen as bulky, cumbersome and just plain ugly.

This was especially true in Japan, where more than one article was written about the unelegant case... and this was often attributed to its poor sales (cited as another way Micrsoft just didn't "get" Japanese consumers).

Perhaps in an attempt to create a more pleasing shape that appealed to more consumers, the 360's sculpted design tried too hard to reduce it's bulk—and its concave curves just compounded the "too much stuff in too little space" problem.

With the cost of oil these days, maybe I'll just pick up a dozen first gen 360s before winter and use them to heat my home.

[xboxfounder]

The industrial design (the outside) was completed first, while the electrical design was still in work. The mechanical/thermal/reliability design was compromised by those two bookends. The box was too small to be able to properly handle the heat and mechanical stress requirements of such advanced electronics. The joke at the time was that Jonathan had designed it out of "unobtanium". Added to that was the immense schedule pressure (to beat sony), and the cost pressure because of all the previous billions in losses. Compounded by a way over matched test director, insufficient test resources, huge gaps in the test and quality org, and one really bad personnel decision by the platform VP that significantly weakened the org's quality, reliability and test capability.

And yes, they've known about this since launch, although the picture has gotten clearer for them over time until they could no longer deny it. But all along, the numbers were horrific. And yes, they do intend to sell all of the old bad design, with just the new heatsink, without qualifying whether that fixes the old design. It works for Zephyr, does it work for Xenon? They don't know if there are secondary effects of the rework, like cracking marginal solder joints simply by removing the old sink and adding the new ones. Pb free solder is brittle, and the heatsink clips are high force and deflect the pcba, stressing the joints. Every time you handle a system like that, bend it or add a mechanical load, it induces a residual stress in the solder joint that shortens its life exponentially. That's why there's such a difference in mean life, and some fail so quickly and some don't fail. The amount of stress they leave the factory with, plus the initial quality of the joints. That makes Xenon an unmanufacturable design. And they knew that at launch with yields in the mid 30 percentile.

And the GPU thermal issues, while the top paretto, still leaves one heck of alot of defects in that population since there were many other problems. And since the x-warranty only covers rrod, they will be using customers to weed out a still too high number of defects from old crappy units that they really should just scrap. But won't because it's a money decision that's good for them and bad for their customers. Once again.

[Jen5en]

One thing is that Microsoft doesn't admit that there indeed is a problem, another thing is that they don't fix a problem that caused them to write a 1.15 billion $ check in the first place. I mean, placing a new heatsink would be far less costy than refurbishing these damn things into eternity. So why is it that they act this way, stupidity or pride?

[THAMMER1]

I think M$ went out of their way to create a smaller box and did not foresee the small heat sink as an issue.

[sumfood4u]

Get it fixed, take your losses, an Regroup your Quality, an not Quanity Ideas!

[DJ]

screwed. Even with the 3rd heatsink, the console still has a poor ventilation system. No wonder Sony put a 5-inch fan in their console; those little things don't look like they could cool off a mouse. Then again, changing the entire ventilation system would implicate and isolate the issue for the whole world to see. 100 Degrees Celcius though?! That's a ridiculously high temperature.

I think it's safe to say that Flextronics will not be asked to design any more Xbox consoles.

[PS360PCROCKS]

Yeah my 360 has been apart many many times and those fans don't spin fast, remove much air and their tiny as hell. It's because Microsoft was pushed into making the console smaller and less "ugly" it's the reason why I modded my console with holes on the top to release even more air...and when my 360 broke for the 2nd time it happened at a party where it just so happened to be very very HOT in my house from the amount of people. It's a shame though, if they would have just had someone with a brain design it...it could have still been a nice looking machine without any of these problems...I think the PS3 is nicer looking.

[360Sheep]

so the ps3 LOOKS like a george foreman grill, but the 360 actually has the ABILITY to cook your meals... nice.

[PS360PCROCKS]

I had to laugh at this...:)

[Mu5afir]

LOL, I had to laugh at this too.. couldn't agree more.

[XxZxX]

nice one.. i would like to see a comeback hehe :D

[nicodemus]

Having a launch console that's still working, (and that was put through heavy, heavy gameplay hours for a year and a half), I can't believe my console's still kicking, with the way everybody talks about it...

Maybe I'm just really lucky, or took the right precautions (standing it vertically, leaving enough room to breathe on all sides), but myself and several others I know, who got the console on launch and Jan 06 respectively, have never had to return any of them.

Obviously, there's a huge problem if MS is gonna pay 1 billion to assure the consumers, but it just seems to me that there must be a whole lot of people who don't know how to take care of their stuff. That, or I really am a miracle story!

[btkadams]

i dont think its the responsibility of the consumer that so many 360s have died. even if having your 360 setup a certain way will prevent it from any problems, the consumer shouldnt have to research on how to do that. the 360 is a game system and should be designed to sit in the shelf like every other game system. my freezer doesnt have enough room for it anyways

[PS360PCROCKS]

You're a miracle worker my friend...my launch 360 worked for oh about a year and 3 months...than the drive went out. So yeah no overheating and obviously not something I could control. I got a brand new one and within 3 months it overheated...this is top of my entertainment center with nothing near it. next to a A/C vent and guess what it died at NIGHT! It was like 70 degrees in my house...

[akaFullMetal]

just sucks that the 360 has a design flaw, and they really cant fix it unless they make ala slim ps2 version of the 360, and still not alienate the masses, and put a spin of good pr that it doesnt break. i dont think microsoft is going to be able to shake this pr til their next system

[Infernus]

I think MS went with a slower (and smaller) fan to reduce the system noise. However they should have just made the console a bit bigger.

The PS3 is flippin huge but it's well ventilated and the fan may be the reason for the size. The PS3 was designed to be well ventilated to avoid the risk of overheating, whereas the 360 was crammed together and told to take the heat like a man.

I think the 360 motto should be 'Some will survive, many will fall'

[XxZxX]

30% failure = some
70% non-problem = many

so "many will survive, some will fail" haha

[Mu5afir]

From what I read, the whole design of the system is flawed. I really don't see how reducing the chip size is going to help much. Yes it might extend the life of the console a few more months, but the core design of the system will stay the same, and the problem will presist.

If Microsoft didn't try to rush the system out, perhaps they wouldn't have made such a drastic error. Look at the DVD9 drive, it is placed right over the GPU, how dumb do you have to be to do this? Very!

[ReBurn]

Smaller chips help because they don't require as much power, therefor they don't create as much heat. That's a pretty simple one. The system's flaw is presumably that the motherboard flexes when it gets hot, so if there isn't as much heat the board presumably won't flex and break solder points.

[xboxfounder]

The mobo and all other materials in the world change shape when exposed to thermal cycles. The initial quality of the lead free joints, the quality of the parts supplied (flatness and sameness of size of the BGA solder balls), and the fitness of the board finish and solder paste homogenaety all play significant roles.

On XB1, Intel made sure the design was manufacturable and had suffiecient margin. On 360, when MS took over those tasks to "save costs", we had no one with that expertise. The mantra was that our CM's were the experts and they would make it happen. Buzzzz. Wrong. Never happens, wishful thinking, to the level of criminal neglect.

[SSCOOLCHEA]

FIRE RUN FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE RUN FIRE RUN FIRE FIRE FIRE RUN ....GET THE WATER PS3..........JUST GOT SPRAY..EVERYONE SAFE

[xboxfounder]

And killed a baby in a house fire? MS response was that it was the users fault, and want the case dismissed. Shamefull. They knew for 2 years prior that XB1 caught on fire before they told their consumers.

I worked on that. But the part that really pissed me off was that Robie Bach delayed the implementation of the new power cord that would prevent this by 3 months because the solution became ready at holiday time, and he didn't want the negative press to affect holiday sales.

That is the kind of people you guys are dealing with. Money over lives. Not just money over customer convenience.

Think about that the next time you want to defend MS in one of these posts.