The Xbox 360 has suffered because of one particularly nasty, overriding issue: the dreaded Red Ring of Death. This hardware fault has seen millions of Xbox 360 owners suffer multiple console failures, and harmed the console’s reputation. But will the arrival, at last, of the new Jasper chipset mean those RRoD problems are now a thing of the past?
When the Xbox 360 was released in November 2005, hopes were high that Microsoft had finally got it right. Building on the relative success of the original Xbox, the 360 was built to be the most powerful games machine of all time, at least until the Playstation 3 came along and stole its crown.
There was one problem, however, a problem that was discovered quite early on when people’s Xbox 360s started failing. It became known as the Red Ring of Death due to the three red lights appearing on the front of the console when the fatal hardware failure hit.
There was uproar in the gaming community, and Microsoft eventually offered to fix or replace every dodgy console in a campaign costing $1 billion. But the problems continue to blight early and mid-life machines to this day, prompting Microsoft to continually strive to improve the hardware.
We’ve already seen new chipsets replacing the older, more likely to melt, chipsets of old. Anyone buying a new Xbox 360 in the past few months probably has a Falcon-equipped console. But the even-newer chipset known as Jasper has now been spotted in the wild, where it will remain until being superseded by the future Valhalla chipset.
The Jasper chipset retains the 65-nanometer CPU (central processing unit) first seen with the Falcon, but the GPU (graphics processing unit) is also now 65nm. In layman’s terms, this means less heat and less noise will be generated by the console, meaning the likelihood of a Red Ring of Death is reduced almost completely to zero.
This has taken Microsoft an age to fix, but it looks like the RRoD time line is almost at an end. That is of course for owners of brand new Xbox 360s. Unfortunately, there are still likely to be consoles out there with old chipsets that could give up the ghost at any moment. It seems the RRoD issue won’t really be put to bed until we move on to the next generation. Xbox 720 anyone?
