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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully the industry has improved their estimates since the Xbox 360

When the 360 was in its preproduction phase Microsoft used Lead based solder. It was what the industry at that time was using. Microsoft didn't notice a problem regarding heat in these units simply because lead based solder is much kinder to heat cycles.

EU at this time put a deadline to the end of use for lead based solder, so the move to leadfree solder was done right before moving to mass manufacturing. The poor cooling solution on the 360 compared to its heat output didn't do the system justice. The PCB would flex as it would not be heated evenly.

After Die shrinks and manufacturing revisions, more mature lead free solder also used. The Jasper units were pretty much tanks, and the cooling solution was oversized as they were the same as before with the much hotter and power demanding lager die first gen chips.

Video Cards from the era of the launch 360 are notoriously unreliable for the same reasons. Heat cycles were a death wish, luckily for videocards they normally had a cool down period after gaming idling at a desktop. While the 360 would commonly go from 100% load term load to off.

I can't get a source for this right now, but I remember having a very intriguing conversation about heat issues and the xbox 360 years ago.

I was talking to an old colleague of mine that was an electronics engineer, and apparently, the issue with the xbox 360 was that the heat inside the case made the solder a bit more softer than expected. This would not be an issue for a horizontally positioned xbox 360, but when placed on it's side (which a lot of people did), this caused extremely slow shifting of certain components on the motherboard towards the direction of gravity. After (for most people) a few years, certain components would shift enough to not have proper contact with the board.

I was offered the analogy of the long-standing pitch viscocity experiment - everything is technically a liquid, just to wildly different degrees.

Not sure if this is true though, it was many years ago!

> I remember having a very intriguing conversation about heat issues and the xbox 360 years ago

Lucky you. I can barely remember conversations I had in the mid nineteenth century.

1661 is the mid seventeenth century, however that joke was timeless.

Yes this was absolutely true. I used to repair these systems when they got the dreaded red ring of death. Microsoft used inferior solder, and coupled this with a poorly designed heatsink mounting bracket. The heatsink mounting bracket on the back of the motherboard was bowed by design, and would pull back on the corners of the CPU, while a middle contact point would press up on the center of the CPU socket. Once heated, this caused the motherboard to flex directly under the CPU, and this stress would pop the ball grid array solder points under the CPU.

The trick was to place a stack of nylon bushings at each corner of the CPU, to take up the free space after removing the bracket. This removed the stress from under the CPU and would usually bring the system back to life for another eight months or so.

Surely the best countermeasure to worsening of the issue would be to advise people to place the xbox 360 horiztonally, no?

This would mean no more stress.

I'm intruiged as to why it would only work for eight months, why wasn't the fix "permanent"?

The position in which you placed the console was a separate issue that caused the same failure. The stress from the mounting bracket was a bigger factor.

I tried looking for a good visual example and this article describes the issue, and fix, pretty well.

https://www.instructables.com/Fix-the-Red-Ring-of-Deathwitho...

The fix would only last so long because once a ball grid array looses connections there is no real fix. It takes very special equipment to create those connections in the first place.

If you search "ball grid array soldering" on YouTube you'll see what I'm talking about. They're a real pain to try to fix once broken.

I remember seeing repair videos where people would fix it by taping or gluing (can't remember) a penny to the motherboard in a particular spot, so this checks out well enough

Starting with the original PlayStation in 1994, nevermind all of the other hardware Sony makes since way before that, they just might have a bit more experience making consoles than Microsoft did in 2010 with the 360. (though to be fair, the original Xbox was released in 2001.)

The first Xbox One was huge with a big fan. My guess was being absolutely sure the first revision did not have thermal issues, but I never asked.

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