| Squilliam said: On one hand, the reason why good PC power supplies rate things like 'hold up time' on their spec sheets is due to factors like this and on the other hand the Xbox 360 uses an external power brick which is user replaceable and available on the 2nd hand market which ought to be enough reassurance for most people. |
The external power brick isn't the concern here, as we're apparently talking about fans and optical group malfunctioning when being underfed. I don't know the frequency response function of the various models of 360 power bricks but there's nothing it can do if it receives a lower power than needed for a time longer than its relaxation time. What the troubleshooting seems to say is that when the power is unsuitably low you get:
- laser diode malfunctioning
- fan malfunctioning
The first is fairly trivial... it means that you will get more disc read errors. No harm done to the hardware, the software will try to cope. But it might look like an optical reader malfunction to the user.
The second is more important: if fans slow down quicker than the chips cool off, you can get out of the safety thermal envelope and damage the chips. Apparently, this is a known issue and is about the design of the chips, fans, motherboard and air circulation engineering. Ideally, everything should be designed so that even when the system is underfed the chips manage to be cooled down enough to not get damaged.
One last thing on the OP: saying that "90% of the damaged 360 were attached to a power strip or surge protector for 6 to 12 months" is statistically meaningless to determine correlation by itself. It should be compared to the failure rate of consoles that were not attached to power strips or surge protectors.
