| WereKitten said: Any power strip (with or without surge protection circuitry) is repartitioning its power intake to its output sockets. Even your barebones power strip (basically three wires that connect in parallel a number of sockets) can deliver fluctuating tensions as its innards can warp as they heat up and the electric contact between plug and socket can be less than optimally stable. Add to that some electronic acting as tension filters and you have a wider array of possible instabilty causes. The power brick acts as a stabilizer (the frequency response that as I said I don't know details how it copes with differently fast variations of the input tension) but it doesn't generate power, thus it's quite irrelevant to the central issue. That being what happens when the system is, for whatever reason, underfed. A good design would ensure that the chips never reach dangerous temperatures, throttling down the clock or even shutting down if they have to. In that sense, even instabilty - that will look like malfunctioning to a user - will be better than overheating the chip, which leads to the permanent hardware damage the knowledge base seems to be talking about. Once again, I doubt very much that the power strips or surge protectors can be affecting the 360s all that much, but - regardless - the design of the innards of the console should be good enough to cope with extended shortages of power indipendently from the behaviour of the external brick. |
Sorry I was tired last night so I didn't quite explain myself.
The Xbox 360 shouldn't overheat even if its suffering from a low power condition. Lets take a hypothetical scenario that Amperage on the 3.3V line will dive before the 12V line. If this is indeed the case and the fans are unable to spin up like they need to. The console itself is using less than half the power it did at launch. After the 66% efficient PSU (cheap is my guess) the console will probably only dispating about 60W of power at full operation. So in this case a significant amount of energy ought to be able to disipate naturally from the vents and even if the internal temperatures rise it will only do so until it reaches equilibrium which I doubt will be enough to cause long term problems so long as it is adequately ventilated.
Tease.
