Well, mine bit it, and I’m pretty sure I’ve owned it for less than a year.
I’m not getting the “red ring of death” that everybody talks about. That’s the old error that indicated a total system failure where the soldering started to wane away due to heat.
Instead mine is just two of the red quadrants lighting up which means it’s overheating. I’d have turned it in under the warranty but I know it’s my fault. I keep the console in a, uh, console that sits below our TV. There’s a door on the cabinet where it resides. I’ve caught myself accidentally running it with that door closed more than a few times now, and that’s when the over heating started. I removed it from it’s little confined space last night, let it sit for hours, and it still overheated. Waited over night and I managed to play a game of Halo this morning without error, at lunch without error, and then this evening it overheated after being on for about 3 minutes.
I’m pretty sure what’s happened is I let it bake in that cabinet one too many times and the thermal transfer glue between the GPU and the heat sink has been baked to a crisp. I’ve got the thing torn down 95% of the way now. I just need to get some new thermal transfer glue, break it down all the way, and patch it back together. It should be better than when it left the factory at that point.
Funny thing about it is when my wife got home from work today she asked me if I really thought I could fix it. “Of course. It’s just a computer,” I replied. I forget sometimes that she’s never seen me rip a machine apart and toss it all back together. Hell, I used to do it when I was 13, with no supervision, no manuals, and no Internet to speak of to guide me along the way. Today? I got YouTube videos from guys showing me the correct way to tear down an XBOX 360 console. A trained monkey could pull this job off.
