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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

Do the people who hack 360s also know how to prevent them from inevitably red-ringing? Cause that's the biggest thing discouraging me from buying another (my other 2 went red).

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The red ring is caused by underfill that is too soft that let's the solder bumps break. It's a BGA packaging problem and there's no fix.

Sure you're not thinking of the PS3 or did both of them actually suffer the same issue?

Both of them experience the same issue. Though it's a yellow light instead of the ring on the Xbox.

IIRC the PS3 issues were a mix of the RSX die cracking and the NEC Tokin caps giving out, not a solder issue.

It was an industry wide problem.

Somehow out of everyone I know with one or both consoles, 100% of 360s got red ring, 0% of PS3s got yellow light.

Fat or slim PS3? Mine experienced a YLOD circa 2010 while the slim that replaced it still works to this day.

Mostly the fat PS3. And the fat 360 too.

It's the same issue that was behind NVDAs "soldergate" fuck-up that ended up permanently souring the relationship between them and Apple.

The core is EU's regulation on lead free solder, which led to a number of people finding out that thermal cycling on the solder led to thermal stresses. Workarounds were identified and any solder formulations since then don't suffer from that issue, so the fix is a complete re-balling of affected chips... a work not for those faint of heart.

Sounds like a R&D problem. Why the dig at the EU?

I'm European, I actually support RoHS - it was just the original cause because everyone up to it getting in force was accustomed to classic, decades-proven leaded solder.

Did they need to have a longer transition period? Looks like it went into enforcement only 2 or 3 years after it was approved.

No, the issue didn't affect the IBM CPU in the 360 or Intel products because they did the R&D work. TSMC and their packaging partners were just lazy.

It was not so much a "not enough time to transition" and more like "there is no consequences yet so why bother OH DAMN WE NEED TO MAKE IT TODAY IT GOES INTO FORCE".

Many had no issues, but a few companies didn't bother to do their homework, problem would have been the same if the period was twice as long.

Why not blame the EU? It is just a well known fact that non-leaded soldier has inferior properties to leaded soldier, which require careful engineering to work around, and still remain somewhat unresolved.

At this point, the directive may have caused more e-waste and environmental damage from part failures than the damage the original leaded soldier would have caused.

You should remember the bioaccumulative properties of lead.

Lead: The most extensively spread toxic environmental contaminant (2024): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97803...

The Urban Lead (Pb) Burden in Humans, Animals and the Natural Environment (2022): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8812512/

> At this point, the directive may have caused more e-waste and environmental damage from part failures than the damage the original leaded soldier would have caused.

“May” is doing a lot of work there. Can you substantiate the claim that the risk of lead is lower than the switching cost?

> At this point, the directive may have caused more e-waste and environmental damage from part failures than the damage the original leaded soldier would have caused.

The problem is where the e-waste ends up - some ditch or desert in Africa. From there it ends up leeching in the environment due to corrosion or, worse, as widespread aerosols when the people there burn the waste to get to the copper.

Complicating the issue is that this was also an early generation of chiplet so there are two levels of bga. motherboard to processing unit and processing unit to chip_actual. the latter commonly are referred to as "bumps" to distinguish from "bga" which attaches the chip_structure to the mother board. A lot of the problem was in the bumps for this chiplet like sub assembly. and while reballing bga is a tricky but well understood process. my understanding is that reballing bumps is nearly impossible.

It's called FCBGA, flip chip ball grid array. The only other option for packaging is wire bonding but that doesn't scale well with pin count.

Technically you could recall and repackage the dies but you'd need millions of dollars in equipment.

Not every model of the 360 will inevitably red ring. Those were typically only the "fat" models and there are some fixes to prevent it from happening. It usually just involves changing to some better quality thermal paste & reflowing the board.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Xbox+360+Red+Ring+of+Death+Fix+...

This video does a deep dive on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24KbVf1AD1c

He suggests that all of the fat models will eventually red ring due to being stress tested at the factory. Not sure how true that is.

RIP Felix has a much better video that explains the cause of the failure.

Factory stress isn't the cause. It was a bad design.

You misread, that's not what I wrote.

You wrote "He suggests that all of the fat models will eventually red ring due to being stress tested at the factory" - it directly states that stress testing at the factory is the claimed reason that the fat models will red ring. Or was the video host somehow stress tested at a factory?

The video states that the stress testing is what aggravates the underlying design flaw.

Share the link?

The problem is internal to the CPU packaging, there isn’t a way to fix it externally. Later 65nm (both GPU/CPU) it’s almost a non-issue, but any others will almost definitely red ring at some point, all you can do is delay the inevitable.

I can't help but think that XBox 360 emulation is the only long term path that exists for the 360, which is concerning because only Xenia to my knowledge exists and it's still experimental.

Maybe it's easier at this point to reverse-engineer Halo 3 into a Windows build

Edit: wait https://store.steampowered.com/app/1064271/Halo_3/ Well it'd still be nice to get the original experience and not to deal with Steam.

The rrod was pretty well know for a long time. Video games are sold to kids so it had the requirement to not use lead solder in them even though lead solder is perfectly safe and no way a child would be exposed to it, unless they eat the xbox.

Lead solder is much softer so with the countless hot cold cycles, when hot the solder expands and when cold it contracts, it will handle these cycles much much better. Without the lead the solder joints are not as soft and the hot and cold cycles eventually results in the solder joints cracking and no longer making a solid connection = rrod.

Some models were more prone to rrod but the biggest trick is to make sure you do regular cleaning and dusting to keep air flow working. Don't put the xbox in a cabinet with no air flow where it will heat up. Put a fan on the xbox if you can. It has been a long time since I followed the xbox scene but there are tons of posts online about the entire problem and best practices to avoid it.

I've not modded my 360E, and it was probably one of the very last 360s built, but I've never had any problems with it, still play on it, and my understanding is there are fewer and less dire problems with it than the prior 360 and S.

The slim doesn't red ring.

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