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Red ring was actually caused by the green blob becoming self aware and refusing to power the console until it was given rights

My first 360 died to the 3-part red ring. It lasted 3 years. My parents got me a new one for Christmas that year and I buried the old one in my closet. I had a friend over at one point, a couple of years after that, and wound up mentioning the old 360 in my closet. She said she could fix it. I told her that if she could fix it she could have it. She opened it up, replaced a melted copper component with a penny, and it worked! That 360 outlasted our friendship.

I remember when my brother use to make money at school by fixing the red ring for people and then had to stop when he almost set our house on fire because he would shove the mother boards in the oven. what a time to be alive

Close your eyes watching this video and you'll hear Hiccup from HTTYD nerding out about the Xbox360.

There were fanboys on forums back in the day who treated the amount of Xboxes they had RROD'd as a number indicating how hardcore of a gamer they were.

21:44 I had a friend that when his Xbox gave him the red ring of death, he would turn it on and then put all of his laundry and clothes and blankets on top of his Xbox for a couple of hours and then come back and turn it off, and it would usually fix the problem at least temporarily. Until one day that stopped working. Then he bought a PlayStation.

I think I got the red ring of death one time and it nearly gave me a heart attack. It turns out it was because the power cord was slipping partly out of the wall. That same 360 still works just fine, funnily enough...

Edit: He even addresses it in the video! Looks like I'm not the only one that happened to. 😂

I have a very vivid memory childhood involving the Xbox 360’s red ring.

I was at a friend’s house, and I went up into his attic for the first time. I saw what was easily like, four or five 360’s stacked up on a piece of wood. When I asked about them, he just answered, “oh, those don’t work anymore.”

Thinking back to that always reminds me of how large-scale this error was.

I can't WAIT for you to talk about Kinect and the disaster that was the Xbox One launch!

Oh boy... unfortunately this video contains errors that largely misunderstand the issue of the red ring of death. Likely due to the amount of bad/misunderstood information there is on the internet about the 360 which you likely used as a source - as most people who reported on the issue had no idea what they were talking about or took things out of context due to lack of understanding.

I was really hoping it wasn't going to be, because we need more good videos that understand the issue on the internet vs ones that spread what are now decades old myths... not a diss though, it's not your fault that there's so much bad info already out there.

The TL:DR is this video does not touch at all on the real fault or what happened - a massive industry issue with flip chip graphics chip design. This was happening at TSMC, the manufacturer for both ATi and Nvidia chips, and their packager, ASE. It was their root fault for this issue and ATi's as well for not catching this issue (the designers and the fab work closely together during a silicon design). This issue also affected the PS3, and many laptop and desktop graphics chips, which were also produced by TSMC. MS essentially took the blame for their contractors (which was nice of them to do). The 65nm GPU was designed in-house at MSFT (codename Gunga). But the fixes were made on the later 90nm chips designed by ATi. In fact, MS went so far as to producing a special 90nm GPU (Elpis) which had issues fixed and ported the newer design from the Y2/Rhea 90nm GPU back to Xenon boards in order to continue repairing them with fixed graphics chips up until 2011.

Here are my notes based on my years of study of the 360 and it's problems:
- 70% of the units were working. The yield was roughly 67% meaning roughly 67% of units worked and 33% did not. Many would be repaired and then sent out while others landed in the "bonepile" to be looked at later. This has been a common mistake in understanding of manufacturing yield.
- The 360 was not prone to overheating. This is a myth. Nor is the internal design "sloppy" or the engineering process "shoddy". The defects in the 360 were actually due to ATi/TSMC/ASE's missteps, not Microsoft's (they did not design the GPU).
- There was no lack of proper cooling. The system was perfectly cable of dissipating the 85W CPU and 55W GPU on the launch unit. The later extended heatpipe GPU heatsink was for acoustic reasons, not thermal. It also allowed for higher wattage binned GPUs to be used if needed - but this did not occur as the Y2L silicon succeeded.
- The overheating graphics chips issue reported did not occur as you might suspect - this was due to an incorrect application of the phase change material (think thermal paste) on the eDRAM of the Multi-Chip-Module of the GPU. This was resolved before launch. I am also not sure what "cracking heatsinks" referred as if this occurred, it wasn't when in use on the console according to the engineer I spoke with. Possibly a supplier/delivery issue. The DVD drive and cosmetic issues did occur though.
- Yield rates were as stated, in the 60s, not the 30s. Many sites didn't understand what yield meant and thus reported it as 2/3rds not working, when in reality, it was 2/3rds working.
- Consoles were not overheating. These reports were due to a misunderstanding of the red ring of death.
- Microsoft was aware of some hardware issues, but not the flip chip issue which caused the RROD plague. The entire industry had not yet understood or realized this problem yet.
- The temperature fluctuations are NOT due to a design error, they are normal. The design error caused incorrect materials to be used (at ATi/TSMC/ASE) which caused the GPU chip to not be able to withstand normal fluctuations.
- There is no such thing as "drying out the soldering". There were no issues related to "dry solder" or "cold joints" or anything like that, this is psuedo-engineering guesses from uninformed individuals.
- The GPU did not disconnect from the motherboard. This is another myth. The cracking connections were inside the GPU chip itself, what connects the die to the substrate. This substrate did not become detatched from the motherboard unless the system was dropped/thrown around/abused etc. (which is to be expected). The myth about it melting it's own solder is impossible, it cannot reach temperatures that would "reflow" or melt the solder. The melting temperature of the lead-free solder on the board is roughly 217C and the console will hard shut off power to chips between 90-110C (depending on model). Even if it did, the pressure from the heatsink clamps would just smush all the molten solder together shorting every connection under the chip, which is not what happened.
- Due to what I said above, it's impossible for the towel trick or q-tip trick or such to "reflow" anything so these fixes were doing nothing and exploiting the "temporary revival" characteristic of a flip chip fault (I won't elaborate here as it gets pretty technical as to why this happens, regardless it's temporary).
- The Zephyr and Falcon revisions were not attempts to fix the RROD, but already existing (before launch actually) cost cuts to the design and additions like HDMI. Yes, they were working on revised GPU chips but the fix was not understood in the silicon industry until around 2008.
- Jasper's release was not the fix of the RROD. This occured in the mid/late Falcon revision with revised 90nm "Rhea" GPUs built with different materials (high-Tg underfill mainly). This resolved the issue, Jasper also was fixed yes but was not "the" fix. Actually, very early Engineering samples of the 65nm GPU had the exact same defect.
- Ehhh the boxy design is just a design choice. Like the 360, the new Xbox's also have a metal "cage" inside that holds their electronics and is the design constraint. The plastic shells are just cosmetic. Yes, a squared design might make it slightly slimmer but if they wanted a nice design, it wouldn't be noticeable. Boxy designs are just the way they went. See the Xbox 360 S for example, still a nice design, not boxy.

Sources: Personal research, leaked documentation, chats with MS Engineers from the 360 team. I also work as an electrical engineer, so I am familiar with the efforts that go into designing complex electronics.

The irony of this coming out as soon as the only thing saving Xbox (gamepass) has a drastic price hike is hilarious

22:07 Very fond memories, I actually did this as my first ever "job" as a kid. Also did custom lighting kits, better power supplies, hard drive upgrades (Including 10k RPM HDDs for nearly instant load times) aftermarket fans. Somewhere I have a pallet of boxes and boxes of 360's and parts from when I would do this.

"I was there. 3,000 years ago..."

0:21 that fallout slide change sound awoke something in me that hasn’t seen the surface in 10 years

22:55 it was temporary because it didn't actually reflow the solder it just expanded the solder joints enough to reconnect them after they cracked due to the temperature changes.

2006 YouTube... ugh, oh man.. right in the feels. Ouch.

I  was about  5 years old when my brothers xbox started to tank. I couldn't quite grasp the issue at the time, I just remembered them constantly taking it apart and putting it back together again. Then one day I tried to boot it up to play viva pinata and the ring of death cast its evil red glow upon the basement. worst weekend at dad's house ever.

"The slow yet inevitable eradication of physical media" 30:30 rip

Failure rate of 68% was never seen before. When it's that bad, it means back to the drawing board. You don't even tolerate 10% (2% is the ceiling).

For example, Sony wanted to target 2005 too, but the Blu-Ray diodes weren't ready. They didn't just push through and risk broken Blu-Ray drives, they instead delayed to 2006. But Xbox wanted to ship in 2005 no matter what and in the end it cost them over $1b to fix, which at the time meant any chance of making a decent profit during the 360 era was now spent.

Fun fact: Xbox has never once made a profit from Xbox hardware. That was revealed in the Apple v Epic case. For whatever reason, they've always struggled to reduce the costs on Xbox hardware.