Pressure Mounts On Xbox Red Ring Of Death Admission: Details Here

By Adam Hartley

Evidence is building that the Xbox 360’s ‘Red Ring of Death’ is indeed more than a ‘standard error’. If recent reports from US retail sources are to be believed, up to one in three Xbox 360s have experienced the RRoD. If this is true, then the failure rate of 306s is six to ten times that of the standard U.S. consumer electronics industry norm.

“The real numbers were between 30 to 33 percent,” a former EB Games employee Matthieu G., told Daily Tech news interviewer this week.

He added that the failure rate was even greater for launch consoles. “We had 35 Xbox 360s at launch I know more than half of them broke within the first six months (red lights or making circles under the game discs). Two of them were dead on arrival.”

An anonymous Best Buy customer service department manager said that failure rates for the console were “between a quarter to a third” noting that: “We see a ton of [Xbox 360s] come back all the time. We strongly push our customers to buy our service plans no matter what they buy, but it is especially important for them with the Xbox 360. It’s a lucky thing for us that Microsoft extended the factory warranty to one year, because we were having a hell of a time dealing with the launch units. Now we don’t have to deal with those broken [Xbox 360s] until their second year, for those who have purchased the two year plans.”

For its part, Microsoft has always to claimed that the Xbox 360 failure rate falls within the industry standard of three to five percent.

You may remember SPOnG’s story of June 29th in which we reported that UK console repair specialists, Micromart, has stopped offering a repair service for Xbox 360s to its retail customers.

SPOnG spoke with Geoff Croft, Customer Support Manager for Micromart up in the north-east of England earlier today. Geoff helpfully detailed the reasons behind the dreaded ‘Red Ring of Death’ and outlined the company’s reasons behind the decision to stop repairing 360s for its UK retail customers.

When we informed him of the news coming out of the US that claims of up to one in three Xbox 360s experienced the problem Croft told us:

“Well, I can’t comment on specific defect rates. All I can say is that we have never, ever before stopped taking in any particular console for any particular reason. Sure, we had issues with PlayStation 1 and 2… there are often teething troubles with most consoles… but we were put in a position with the Xbox 360 where the available resource we had [to fix them] and the anecdotal evidence we were reading about in online reports just made it lead to us to take this decision to refer our customers experiencing this problem directly to Microsoft”

What’s more, he added that, “the reliability following repairs and the reliability of the available repair methods isn’t something that we’re happy with.”

So, SPOnG asked the console repair man, what exactly is the the problem?

“The problem was mainly a motherboard issue, we believe, related to dry joints (solder on the motherboard) overheating. There could be any number of issues why this is happening, but essentially it is a problem with overheating.

Can it not just be re-soldered and fixed straightforwardly?

“No, we’re talking thousands of joints which need to be ‘reflowed’… I’ve seen the anecdotal stuff online as to how gamers have been fixing the problem – with heat guns, towels, hairdryers, shoving the thing in the windscreen of a car in the sunny day, even, quite worryingly wrapping it in tinfoil and sticking it in the oven or the microwave!! - the main point with all of these ‘temporary fixes’ being that the solder reflows and resets into a position that makes the 360 work, temporarily.”

“We’re obviously independent from Microsoft and we recommend our customers go directly to Microsoft to get the motherboard replaced… as this is the only way of repairing the problem, in our opinion,” Croft informed us.

Aside from obvious concerns about gamers sticking broken Xbox 360s in the microwave for 30 seconds in the hope that they will come back to life (top tip kids: DON’T DO THIS!) Micromart informed us that Microsoft currently charges customers £90 for repair of the problem.

SPOnG has put a call in to Microsoft in the UK for an update on the matter – specifically to find out if repaired Xbox 360s are fitted with new motherboards or reconditioned ones. We’ll update you on that shortly.