Well, I got the Xbox 360 yesterday, it took me all of 15 minutes to take it apart. One thing I like about the 360, it’s easy to take apart. I had all sorts of issues with the Wii. Of course, I happen to have the tools available to take these types of things apart. Remember, I tinker with things constantly, so I’ve had to deal with a lot of  screw protections, so I have an entire set of bits that alleviate the pain of not having the right screw driver

The first things I tried were this:

• The blanket method – FAIL
• Overheating it by disconnecting the fans – FAIL
• Replaced the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU with Arctic Silver, which I happened to have laying around  – Not sure yet. I put the CPU heat sink on the incorrect way as you can see in my picture. This causes the box to go directly to the 2 RROD overheating. I don’t know why, because the heatsink is still making contact with the CPU and it took much longer to overheat before when I disconnected the fans. Perhaps the X-Clamps aren’t connecting correctly. I will update this post once I’ve tested this completely. Seems like it did not work, but the fan has gotten considerably quieter. This means that the thermal paste originally on the 360 is garbage.

So, the next few things to try are going to be X-Clamp mods, I’m still going to play with overheating the box before I purchase other hardware to do those mods. The good thing is, it looks like no one has even touched the inside of this box, it’s 1 year old, and is actually an Xbox 360 Pro console with a Hitachi drive. HDMI is also there, and it came with a Wireless controller instead of a wired one which core consoles come with.

We shall see how this turns out in the coming days when I have more time to do tests on this box, if I end up being able to fix it today I will update this post. Regardless, there will be a part 2, part 2 may focus on either more attempts to fix the box or replacing the firmware with a hacked one. I will go as far as I can go with this, to the heat gun technique.

I’ve also yet to try the simplest method – swapping the Xbox 360 cables. I would *guess* that the person who owned the box tried this, but I don’t know. I’ll find someone around here with cables and try it out.

Stay tooned..

On a side note I will be upgrading my VPS memory..

Related?

• Quick update on the Xbox 360 Experiment
• The $61 Xbox 360 Experiment

Tags: experiment, xbox 360

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Experiments, Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.