Source: www.examiner.com

In a very little known article posted on the Gamespot UK website back in September, a survey conducted by warranty company Squaretrade has found that less than 4% of new Xbox 360's fail due to the Red Red of Death. This is largely in part to the new Jasper chip inside of the console which greatly reduces heat and power consumption. From the article,

SquareTrade found that Xbox 360 quality has improved dramatically since the third quarter of 2008, shortly before the 65nm CPU/GPU "Jasper" model was introduced. Since then, first-year failure rates have plummeted to below the 4 percent the company projected. Looking at 500 units purchased in 2009, SquareTrade found that less than 1 percent had suffered the Red Ring of Death.

This is really great news for Microsoft's Xbox 360 after previous surveys have shown the 360 to fail 30% to 50% of the time before Jasper was released. Heading into the holidays, consumers should no longer have to fear that their console will get the RRoD if they get a 360 for Christmas or plan on buying one for someone else.

This article was posted back in September so why has nobody heard of this yet? Why was this news not being spread like wildfire? Obviously this latest survey is not the be-all end-all (after all they did only look at 500 Jasper consoles, not a very large sample size) but does give a more reasonable and seemingly accurate result than the exaggerated surveys of the past.

Are all 360s made in 2009 the Jasper models?

Too bad I bought mine in 2008.

Good news but I'm still waiting for the Valhalla chip set to come out before I would buy another 360. Also all signs point to it using a 45nm CPU/GPU combo chip instead of 65nm which will make it even better.

No one on this forum likes positive 360 news. Thats why no one heard. I've been arguing that failure rates have been going down for over a year, and no one has cared.

Good to see some vindication, even if its just Square Trade.

The Jasper chip set was introduced September of 2008, but because there were still so many made using the old chip-set, it was hard to find one. It's most likely that the ones in the stores now are all using Jasper.

Not all of them some of the early 09 elite models still where Falcon models.

SquareTrade is 360 biaseded!!!!
they probably saided its 40% but MS Moneh hatted them so they scratched the zero.
now if you excuse me im going to play uncharted 2 EXCLUSIVALLY on PS3

-switches on PS3 and got a YLOD-

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU------

Wrong. Once they change manufacturing processes, the only ones available would have been Jaspers as it would require an entirely different manufacturing process to make both Falcons and Jaspers alongside eachother.

What happened is that there were excess elite mobos since the Elite model hasn't sold (that) well compared to other models. Because of that, they put a different shell on some of the elites and called them 'new' despite the fact that the mobo and components were indeed old.