I have that exact same cable box that he/she has, and that thing gets hotter than hell.  It sometimes will make the recorded shows mess up(sound cutting out, image messing up) due to over heating.

this thread stands as proof for how utterly oblivious and, nar i say, dipshitty, people can be.
Let's take an expensive piece of electronics, which has an infamous and well publicized history of overheating issues, and sandwich it between two other pieces of electronics... then make things even worse by shoving this electronic engineer's nightmare into an airflow challenged box, which ironically, is about the size the little frankenstien's coffin would be 'when' it dies for good.
and the best part.... whine like the irresponsible-it's not our fault-we don't pay attention turds we must be, and while we're at it, think we'll throw a f#@k MSFT out there even though they told us not to do this.
Kills me. (if you're wondering why that was was written third person plural, it's cause there's unfortunately millions of you out there)
@theonestar, people who try so hard to sound smart usually come off as just that, people trying real, real hard to sound smart.... "it's a simple matter of physics...."
please, if you were any dimmer, you'd be the lightbulb in my car's glove compartment. (which doesn't work by the way) You know, it's a wonder that, in a desperate search for further cost saving tricks, the engineers at MS didn't come up with your briliant little nugget..."uhhhh...you know.... just put something else ontop of your 360... see...uhhh....this will act as an additional heatsinker thing and help to mitigate the heating, as it were, on the uhhhh... inside of the xbox. I mean really, really good idea here folks, and, you know uhhhh.... you can really use just about anything you know, an old book, a shoe, a couple pieces of thickly sliced ham spread out in such a way to uhhhh... cover the entire topity of the uhhhh....machine there, as it were..."
Genius. Pure Genius.
(god i hate people sometimes)

Could you please retype that in an East Indian accent?

ha. I had E74 error back in December, did everything to survive it called Microsoft and told my 360 was only a year old, so happen my warranty was over.. repair fee $100.

So what I did, I opened my 360 and did the X-clamp mod to it and since then its been working better than when Microsoft build it..

It is godly when compared to how it was before, it is nearly as quiet as the PS3!!! Pity I can only install one game at a time, and no multi disc games (and no I am not going to shell out for a larger HDD, I have better things to spend my money on)

Sorry about the RRoD, I got my Xbox last June, and have been really paranoid about it breaking, so it sits on a table with nothig obstructing it in any way, I wouldn't think stacking is a really great idea with these boxes

Thanks for trolling! Now, let's see you actually say something worthwhile instead of just telling me I'm a fool for actually knowing what I'm talking about. Because you obviously don't.

So far, you've just demonstrated that you didn't pay any attention at all to what I said. A cable box is made up of a large amount of metal, particularly the bottom side (unless the manufacturer really screwed up). What is a heatsink made of? Metal. Usually copper and aluminum, and sometimes steel.

What does the heatsink do? It absorbs the heat, pulling it away from the processor, ecause simple air doesn't do that. That's why they attach a heatsink to the processor, with the fan cooling the heatsink, not the processor. If this concept didn't work, then why on earth does EVERY SINGLE processor in use do that to cool? Use common sense.

Many, many times, the best way to cool something is to add some form of heatsink - whether it be a hunk of metal or a water tube - and pull it away from the thing needing cooling. That's what a cable box on top of a 360 will do. Obviously, that's not the best way to cool it - there are simpler, more effective manners of doing so - so obviously nobody's going to tell you do that to cool it. But the fact still stands that it works. Likely only for a few tenths of a degree, but it still does it.

The fact that you've gotten so worked up over this proves that you have absolutely no clue what you're saying, and you've pretty much just made yourself out to be the very person you said I was. Genius. Pure genius.

Its true metal absorb heat, That is if not generating heat itself like the CABLE BOX does.

Cable box (while plugged in) generates heat also transfers heat to anything it sits on..

The Cable Box is trying to get rid of heat so the Xbox 360, add does two and all they will do is exchange heat that only increase in temperatures to each other..

The funny part is I live about 3 hours from Microsoft HQ, but for some reason they shipped it way down south to get fixed, if 10 days is the norm. I'm wondering if it got stuck on the loading dock in Kentucky during the big icestorm, it took over a week for UPS to ship it back once MS gave me a shipping #.

Which is why you'd be a complete moron to run the two together, or near the same times. Obviously it's not going to absorb heat if it's generating its own.

Besides, there's zero reason to run them both at the same time, so that's practically a nonissue anyways. However, it does become an issue if you run the 360 directly after watching TV... but that's a rare situation as well so it's also not a big concern.

The point is, yeah, it's not the best of ideas to have it set up that way. But it's obviously not as big a deal as everybody's making it out to be. It's incredible how misinformed so many of you are.

I am glad this ended well. It is always nice to have people in the community to help (trolls aside) who will give pointers when issues arise. I like being able to come on here and ask for assistance regarding pc/360 ect issues and get intelligent answers. Hope your console stays on the up and up.