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slowmo on 23 July 2012
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sethnintendo said:
fillet said:


Wikipedia can say what it likes. I repair RROD Xbox 360s and can tell you straight it's always down to the solder. Everyone who repairs Xbox 360s knows this, you've heard of "reballing" right. It's a solder term and term that goes hand in hand with the Xbox 360. Basically the console PCB bends due to heating and cooling down, solder cracks. End of strory.

It's not speculation.


Yea I am aware of solder considering I used to be a BGA and ECN tech at Flextronics.   Apparently, they didn't run enough "real world" test to see that the PCB bends.  There were obvious design flaws in the first generation of 360s that they finally fixed.  Didn't the Jasper chips pretty much eliminate the RROD or drastically reduce it once they came out?

They did several revisions but the Jasper did resolve the issues for the old motherboard layout and of course the Slim maintained this reliability with the new layout.  You can of course still get RROD with a Jasper board but the actual RROD is a general fault code for the 360 and only the secondary code can tell you if it is the old favourite "0102". 

I think Microsoft did consider increasing the board thickness in the 360 but realised it would cause possible issues with timing so they decided to reduce the heat through die shrinks to the CPU and GPU to stop the board warping through heat exchange.  They obviously also tried the quick and dirty fixes of gluing chips to the board and changing the xclamp tension so as not to provide as much pressure on the board.  I believe the Falcon HDMI chassis altered the board fixing heights to minimize board flex, it also introduced improved heatsinks.  They literally tried everything to make up for the systemic fault introduced by the fact their design spec was finalized before the lead free solder legislation.  I honestly don't think they knew exactly what the issue was until 12 months after release and then they were firefighting looking for a resolution.

 

People ask if Microsoft could have been handled RROD better, in my opinion once they knew the scale of the problem they delayed until they knew precisely the ramifications of what they'd done and that they could finance the cost of the mistake.  I think they handled it as well as can be expected given it was unprecedented.  This of course is no excuse and people who were out of pocket thanks to Microsoft, have every right to be angry and I would probably have taken legal action under the Sales of Goods act in the UK had I been affected.