I am not eccentric, I am concentric - Salvador Dali
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Kinect causes Xbox 360 to fail
GAMING HARDWARE FLOGGER Microsoft has denied that its Kinect motion controller is causing the 'Red Ring of Death' failure to return to Xbox 360 consoles.
Users have registered complaints that Microsoft's recently released Kinect controller device is causing their Xbox 360's to fail.
The BBC reports on users' protests that Kinect blew out little Timmy's Xbox 360 over the Christmas period. Specifically, their beloved consoles have been showing up with the same three flashing red lights, the error signals that plagued the first Xbox 360 machines on the market.
The Red Ring of Death failure was a noticeable embarrassment for the Vole's shiny next generation Xbox 360 when it was released in 2005. IBM and AMD worked on the first GPU in the Xbox that was allegedly at fault for causing consoles to overheat, resulting in the Red Ring of Death.
However, Microsoft has since moved to a CPU and GPU combo for slimline Xbox 360s that requires much less power. It would be interesting to see if this problem is only plaguing older Xbox 360s or if it is affecting new slimline models as well. Either way, being as it's on the Internet, all the evidence is circumstantial and Microsoft is putting it down to coincidence.
A Vole spokesperson said the Kinect was "designed to work with every Xbox 360 sold to date".
"There is no correlation between the three flashing red lights error and Kinect. Any new instances of the three flashing red lights error are merely coincidental." µ
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the blame for rrod was poor heatsink design and that shitty lead free solder used, its crap, doesn't handle stress very well, lead solder has a lower melting temp but atleast it will hold up alot better
The original RROD was caused by a bad heat sink attachment design, which allows the CPU heat sink to tilt a bit and greatly reduce the area of hat sink in contact with the CPU; thus allowing the CPU to overheat. Of course, the problem will be exacerbated by bad fan bearings, dust/hair (I have cats so I know all about hair clogging ventilation units) blocking vents, or excessively warm rooms (which, rumour has it, is bloody unlikely in the UK in Summer).
The controller's input requests are making the cpu do more work. Perhaps not much, but if it's only 5% more over a 3-5 hour playing period, then that could be enough to push the temperature up enough to make the unit fail.
It shouldn't happen, but dust, older fans etc all contribute to poorer cooling.
That's my 2 cents.
FYI if you are in Europe then you are entitled to up to 5 years on electronic goods. I've had a PS3 repaired and the repairing engineers supplied a pre-printed letter asking for the retailer to pay the repair costs as it's a known production fault.
You should be able to get it repaired for free if you purchased in the European Union. Search for a repairer near you who does these type of letters as part of the repair deal.
The repairer said to me the HMV are good at paying out and that GAME are poor at paying out.
I am on my 4TH 360. Two replaced under warranty, one with a shady return, and now this last one I have to pay $99 to have fixed. Boo on Microsoft!!
The problem is with early X-Box's not the later ones. RROD is early gen x-box units.
X-Box Jasper unit has a 4% failure rate much lower than previous generation X-Box's. The Slim I suspect is even less. The PS3 has a higher failure rate than the latest X-Box's.
Regardless my wife and kids play Kinect Dance Central, Kinectimals, and Sports for hours and my 360 is in the closet behind closed doors. Sure it gets toasty but no problems at all with the system. The fan is going full when I open the door but its chugging along fine.
The kinect is only a USB periphal, no? So 500mA is the most it could draw. And I was under impression most of the smarts were in the peripheral itself...
As pointed by the first commenter
Ring = old X-Box 360
Microsoft was circulating the old furnaces even those with pre-Jasper motherboards as recently as 2010 so some unlucky people might find them selves with the original "death box".
I doubt it is an issue with the new slimmer X-Box. As pointed out it consumes a lot less power and has a thermally redesigned CPU/GPU chip.
And the added computation needed for the Kinect to work stresses the CPU a lot more then just running a simple game. This could really be a fire test for the old hardware.
I wonder how much more cash will Microsoft & its customers need to put down this sinkhole.
does this mean the Kinect will be as big a success as iPhone4
Seen a few reports of this but no mention of the age of the affected machines. My 1st gen got red ringed, fixed with a few pennies and some insulation tape - worked fine since, also have an elite downstairs with the Kinect attached and she working fine. Happy people have no stories so it's understandable that we only hear the bad stuff. Given the numbers of Kinects sold i am willing to bet that this is a very small percentage of affected consoles, without quantifyable numbers the story falls a little flat in my opinion.
Didn't the new xboxes have a redesigned where the error was now a central red light?
That should make clear that if there's a ring it's the old xbox360.