XBOX 360 Red Ring Of Death DIY

Prevention DIY, not fixing. Yahoo! News is reporting that Microsoft has come up with a fix for new consoles, and it got me curious about the problem, so here we go:

They used the wrong kind of solder in the XBOX 360. They used lead-free solder. They used lead-free solder because the [deleted]s in Europe passed the RoHS directive and now you can't use lead solder in anything sold in Europe. Microsoft would like to sell XBOXes in Europe, so they used lead-free solder.

So?

So lead-free solder sucks. It is WAY WAY WAY less tolerant of imperfect application, as well as being harder to work with and requiring more-frequent replacement of your soldering tips. Oh, and it contaminates lead solder tools so you have to have two sets. And you can't use it on lead soldered boards, or vice-versa. Oh, and the main problem with it is that it's brittle

So?

So when your XBOX overheats, it melts the solder holding the two most important chips inside (the CPU and GPU) and they can move around. Moving microchips = bad = 3 red lights ring of death failure.

Hold on there.

How is this a DIY?

You can do what I did. When I first got the XBOX I noticed that, after running for a while in a cabinet with passive ventilation, the fans were loud as [deleted] and the exterior case was pretty warm to the touch. Being an electronics technician by training and an informed person generally, I know that when the outer case of an appliance is warm, the insides are REALLY FREAKING HOT!!!!!1!! and that's BAD.

I rigged up active cooling for my entertainment center. It ended up with a 6" fan directly behind the XBOX, sucking the hot air coming from the XBOX and blowing it out of the cabinet. Cool air was drawn in the bottom of the cabinet. The fan was quieter than the fans in the gaming console and, in fact, was often left on because we didn't notice it was running.

The fans on the console never sped up, ever, even a little bit, after that.

BAM! No overheating, no melted solder, no problem.