Microsoft's hot X-Box cock-up exposed

In the style of all mechanics everywhere it looks like he took in a deep breath at an unfixed machine, breathed out slowly threw his teeth, shook his head and said "It's knackered mate."

The bloke said that the temperature gap on the board at room temp was 22 degrees C which is about 10 degrees C hotter than industry norms.

For some reason the fan was about half the size of a desktop PC's in a bid to reduce the noise, but that would make things heat up a bit too.

The un-named expert said that the heatsink on the graphics LSI is so small it is unlikely to really cool down the board. Microsoft had to shrink the graphics LSI heatsink so that the DVD drive could be placed above it.

This was going to make things really cook. Sure enough five minutes after booting up a game, the graphic LSI heat sink temp rose to 70 degrees C. Soon it was really cooking. If the machine was being used in a hot room, or the vents got a bit of dust in them, the heatsink would possibly hit 100 degrees C.

Now you would think that the heatsink would be something that Vole would want to do something about pretty pronto. Well apparently not.

When the thermal expert had a look at a fixed machine he was surprised that it didn't have a new heatsink or seem to tackle any of the thermal problems that the Xbox 360 seems to suffer from.

There's a translation of the article here. µ