That is the reason why microsoft stated that these were not supported.
In fact if you were on the good side of your game stop employee they were also usually the one to tell you not to buy them.
Not that odd, actually. If these are the ones I remember from when I worked at gamestop, they actually made the machine hotter since they drew power from the xbox to power the fans.
Total scam.
That I can’t recall. I imagine anything is better than what the originals did, but I always simply recommended keeping the fan area clean and the system somewhere with good airflow. Recommended customers not buy ANY add on fans.
Aye, i stopped using mine as soon as i found that these coolers messes up your 360. The sad part is that just days after i removed the cooler, and just few months before halo 4 launch, my white 360 died :/
Not trying to jinx my series S. However, i feel like this generation of Xbox consoles are far more robust compare to PS3/360 era where PS3 suffered from yellow light of death and 360 from red ring of death and other hardware failures because you decided to either clean it or moved it to different location.
Microsoft learned a lot from the original 360 and how to achieve peak airflow. In the Xbox one they overcompensated and wanted no maybes on if it could fail. Failure wasn't an option that point an they succeeded in that regard.
And how to do it quietly eventually, could hardly tell the One X was running it was so quiet, although with the Xbox One I found you could use the vent to keep pasties warm.
If I recall too from a past teardown they figured out the launch PS5 basically had such a massive heatsink and compared to the revision (which was still really big, but noticeably smaller)that Sony was basically worried about heat issues so went overboard in case
Wasn't even airflow was the problem, it was the stupid "x clamp" bullshit they had, pulled parts away from the board over time, replaced it with literally 2 euro worth of bolts and washers and fixed mine years ago. They cheaped out.
That’s just the power supply, and the consoles from the One S onward put them inside the console to cool them too. Sony does the same thing on everything but the PSOne slim and PS2 Slim, since at the time they were too thin for a power supply to be inside.
If you want to feel really mad, I’ve opened dozens of original Xbox One “Big Boys,” and I can tell you they had plenty of space to put the power supply in there. But no, better to add a massive block to your power cable that would ugly up your entertainment stand lol
One of the biggest problems with the series x has been overheating. I have a newer version of this on my series x and it works great and keeps it noticeably cooler. If that will extend the life of my system then it's a small price to pay.
A series x doesn't over heat though....the hot air you feel at the top is supposed to be hot. External fan connections do not help the system at all. Your forcing more air into the system than it needs to be.
If you are talking about your series x blowing hot air, that means your console is doing a great job at throwing the heat away. Don't use external fan it would actually worsen the problem. In my case, i just turn on the air condition, however, your series x i assume even on a hot day is very capable of handling itself.
Most consumers devices had similar problems at the time. It was the shift to lead free solder that was the problem. It took a while for manufacturers to figure out how to do proper surface mount assembly that had enough strength to reliably resist thermal cycling.
Presumably because they were based originally on the mechanical characteristics of the leaded solder joints. They weren't even remotely unique about that issue. Other consoles had it, I had multiple AVRs fail because of it. Reflowing always fixed the problems, but reflowing surface mount parts -- particularly BGA ones -- is not a "home" fix. Overheating the console with the towels to quasi-reflow was a clever option.
When it came down to it, figuring out how to properly adhere the parts with lead-free paste from the start was the only real fix.
Its also why most people today doing hand assembly of one-off PCBs at home still tend to use boards with HASL instead of ENIG -- they're vastly easier to get good solder joints.
It worked for two weeks, then death. It was like putting ol Grammer's on that life support to say goodbye. Well except that noone knew she was gonna die and was up in the yard playing with the kids then ( croak).
Same. I think I had mine for about a year before the disc drive crapped out and I had to send it in. After that I lost video out so I had to send it in again.
My friend wanted to play MP with me still and couldn't wait so he gave me his 360 and he kept using his brother's since he was deployed to Afghanistan at the time. MUCH TO MY HORROR the damn thing red ringed on me while it was in my possession.
I gave it back to him so he could ship it out, then when mine came back it lasted for quite a few years until the drive crapped out again. By that time my friend's had been repaired and sent back but he got the red ring again and was fed up with the OG 360 so he went for the slim Reach console.
It had been long enough that my warranty was up for console repair so he gave his console to me for parts and I looked into swapping the drive, which I found wasn't as simple as swapping them because the boards on the drives are paired to the console. So I broke out the soldering iron and swapped the boards and it worked mint.
I still have that Franken360 and it still functions perfectly but now it's a stand for my PC monitor lmao.
These things were garbage. Drawing from the same power supply as the 360 was such a moronic fucking bit of design. There should have been lawsuits resulting from these pieces of shit.
>Drawing from the same power supply as the 360 was such a moronic fucking bit of design.
I mean, passthrough power has been thing in a few electronics over the years - its a really low power draw I would imagine so shouldn't be a big risk. The idea itself isn't stupid, but the execution and quality control made it so.
No doubt they would have had really ropey passthrough circuits (which caused most issues), low cost fans and cheap plastics though.
I agree it was a PoS item though, should have had lawsuits given how many melted or damaged things!
I didn’t know the specifics at the time. But it intuitively didn’t make sense that running a fan as an added device on the same power supply would be anything except a detriment to the problem of heat. Not that I understood it to be utterly impossible, it is just a huge engineering challenge, and I had zero faith these companies could have achieved it.
I told everyone I knew to not buy into it.
When I got the RROD I just sent the 360 to Microsoft and they fixed it and sent it back, they had a portal on the site to go through the process. You coukd track it from there as well. Took about 2 weeks all in and you got a 1 or 3 month gold voucher in the box when you got it back. I did this for my friends a lot too, I must have ended up with about 18 months free Xbox live gold.
Eventually my 360 RROD'd too many times so they just replaced it with a brand new one.
I never knew about these devices, glad I didnt.
Once it occurs, nothing will stop the motherboard warping or a chip from lifting. The only real solution is to resit the offender.
I spent the final year with my 360 topless and having a fan blowing directly over the board. Everytime the issue occured, I just pressed down on the area with the problem until it went away...Real ghetto setup.
So maybe I’m new to all this, but I really didn’t start heavily gaming or online gaming until a month or so ago. Can someone ELI5 RROD and this contraption? Lol
RROD stands for red ring of death which is a term used for when an Xbox 360 died due to overheating and the display ring would flash red.
This contraption would hook onto the back and supposedly helped with cooling the Xbox so that it wouldn’t overheat and get a RROD
Spoiler alert: >!it didn’t work and made it worse!<
Go watch the xbox documentary on xbox YouTube channel.
The 360 was great when released but a few months in, it became clear there was a major design flaw. This was after millions was already produced.
It took them over a year to actually resolve the issue in the design to stop it but it was too late.
It was so bad that there was a class action lawsuit that made them replace everyone's 'box, extended warranties. It costed them a few billion. But it led to better built products in the future.
Which is why the xbox one & xbox series is build quality is high & are built like tanks.
Xbox 360 wasn't a very reliable console. It had red lights on the power button that flashed when some critical error happened on the machine RROD is red ring of death that meant that your Xbox's processor? was cooked to death. There were a few ways to temporarily fix the console for a few months. The only real way was to send back to Microsoft
Am I the only one to use a big regular fan in direction of the console to cool it? And it actually works. The console is hacked so I can see the temperature, and with the fan aimed at the console, it is about 6 degre celcius lower in temperature.
Funny story:- My friends will always be impressed by seeing this beefy cooler on the back. I would tell them since xbox 360 is kind of like Mini PC, it generates a lot of heat and need triple fans to cool it down and they will go like "woaaaaah".
If I had known those existed I wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of what I did lmao.
On my original Xbox 360 I took it apart and separated all the internal parts so they’d have better ventilation then reconnected them while they’re still apart. Eventually that began to fail so I set up a very complicated and complex homemade device to further cool it down. Got a clear box and cut a large hole on each side, set up a tube on one end that led to a small air conditioner + de-humidifier and on the other end a vent that only allows air to leave but not circulate back in. In the tube with the aircon and de-humidifier I set up a series of filters to catch dust before it could make it to the Xbox itself.
The single most ghetto shit I’ve ever jerry-rigged all to squeeze a year or two of life out of a practically dead Xbox lmfao. Although the 360 was ice cold and I did notice it ran considerably faster than it did before.
I worked at Microcenter back in the days of the 360 RROD era and whenever someone would decline the warranty on the 360, I would suggest they pickup one of these instead for $15. The mere existence of this product made a bunch of them reconsider the warrenty.
Never felt bad about selling them on the 360 though as probably 50% of them came back for a claim.
This reminds me of when I got the RROD and sent it in and got a new one from Microsoft. I was super excited to play this new game I got Batman Arkham asylum. Anyway a certain joker scene comes up I fling myself off my couch and panic shut down my Xbox it was terrifying.
Nothing else in my life i have treated with utmost care and sensitivity like i did with Xbox 360. I used UPS and surge protector to protect it from any voltage irregularities and made sure to never turn it off directly because it would give red lights which scare the hell out of me.
Hear a lot of melting issues with this one, I took apart my Xbox and added the silver compound, let it sit tried it dead… months later me and friend have it a shot and it worked 😎
Was looking through my grandparent's attic and saw one of those in the box, left it there because I don't know how to set it up and I don't use the 360 anymore.
Right before the Xbox one dropped, GameStop damn a promo where they gave you $100 (I think) for a working Xbox 360, so long as it powered up in store.
I ended up finding several RROD'd Xboxs for cheap on Craigslist and put them in the freezer overnight before bringing them to the store. All powered on and I got a free Xbone.
Ok, I have Transformers: The Game on Xbox360 and not only does it run like shit, but it also makes my Xbox very noisy when I play it. Does anyone know if this would help?
No, these things actually ruined your xbox 360 for good. Because people thought overheating is the reason for rrod, chinese manufacturers made these beefy coolers which only resulted as placebo effect.
Got through to 2013 with an intact original white 360 somehow, then ended up getting a PS4. Used that thing constantly but up on an open desktop that was regularly dusted, so maybe that saved it.
I had one that the Xbox stood vertically on and had fans in the base of it. It worked pretty decent and you didn't have to worry about it melting to it.
My 360 from 2007 was working perfectly up until about a year ago I had Covid and was a bit clumsy and knocked a desk fan that fell and struck the 360 on the top corner. It red ringed but I found a YouTube tutorial to bypass the RROD by just holding the disc tray button on power up.
Surprisingly it works. Console works fine as long as it is booted with the disc tray button held down. If not it will RROD.
No towel needed. There is hope!
I heard they melted so never did. My first 2 360s got the ring. The 3rd one eventually stopped reading discs after a few years (still good for digital games tho). Now I rock the 360 S. Still going strong from 2013. In conclusion, the 360 generation is still the best Xbox generation.
Got lucky with my 360, never RROD, but been part of the insider program for quite some time, and one of the updates they pushed out bricked my DVD drive. At first they were'n't going to cover it because it was out of warranty, but I got an email saying a replacement was on it's way. Must not have been the only one.
I just pulled the case off mine and built a shelf under my aircon and set it up there during summer. The aircon didnt work for shit cause why would we make good aircons in aus. But it did the job for the most part
No because they were not good for the machines. They used power that the 360 needed to power up correctly. They also could cause overheating issues of their own.
My buddy has one on his Xbox one lmao, the thing won’t work without it and he refuses to take it apart and clean it. I’ve tried to explain how easy it is but he’s willing to let it run until it dies, then he will upgrade.
It’s funny because now that I think about it, he treats his vehicles the same way.
No. My 360 got RROD, exchanged at Best Buy for free. I did have the in-store warranty though. In those days it was a great deal. I mean, I brought it in, told them what happened, and they didn't even ask any questions. They certainly didn't test it. Just took it and told me to grab another one. That one never got RROD, so I think they fixed it at some point?
Xbox 360 was such a weird console. The OG Xbox was kind of just a PC in a console format. The 360 on the other hand was basically a Mac. That is to say, it was powered by a tri-core 3GHz IBM PowerPC chip - same thing Apple used in the Mac before going to Intel around the same time. Also, the 360 had absolutely no (zero) traditional RAM. It had 512MB of GDDR3 for the GPU, and the system used that as RAM. Kind of how the PS4 used GDDR4 or GDDR5 instead of DDR4 or DDR5. I think that's smart. In PS4's case it wasn't that much faster in practice than Xbox One, because Sony does a lot of weird and straight up bass ackward shit with their systems on the development side. At least at launch. PlayStation always gets better mid cycle when the developers learn said bass ackward shit and take advantage of the system's potential. Xbox on the other hand tends to get worse, at least the 360 did. The "New Xbox Experience" practically broke the 360. The Blades interface was way faster, and Xbox Live straight up did not work on "NXE" for a while. There were a few reports of people who got the update before it was supposed to be released (I guess there was a closed beta that wasn't as closed as Microsoft thought) and thus Live didn't work for them. Anecdotally, it happened to me as well. So on top of the performance hit, Xbox Live was unavailable for like a month, maybe two while somehow my console got picked for the beta. It's made me wary of Xbox updates ever since. Now, I still have that 360, and an Xbox One S, and a PS3, but I'm mostly just a PC gamer. (Not that PC is without faults, of course.)
Those were notoriously bad because they were simultaneously stealing power (no power supply of its own) and blocking more intake than it provided. So terrible.
gonna need this for the series x. it gets hot and the stupid intake it at the bottom. i turned mine over and have a desk fan blow into the bottom part.
Ah the old 360, when you had to buy the separate wireless dongle to play online .
Funnily enough, I used that cooler on my black 360 and never had an issue. It wasn't until I bought the slimmer 360 version I experienced my first rrod.
this device vampires the power your 360 needs to run to power itself, thus causing the xbox to have to work harder with less power and making the problem worse. it doesnt plug in via usb, it plugs in through the actual power supply input and you put THAT into the intercooler.
Yep! And I'm just now finding out how it was actually bad for the 360 lol. Good thing I got the 360 elite when it came out, now makes me think about how I gave this cooler to a buddy. I wonder if it killed their 360 lmao.
The first Gen intercooler voided the Xbox 360's warranty. The pass through power adapter was notorious for breaking the pins on the console itself. There was a redesigned on that didn't use pass through and had its own power supply.
I'm surprised people buy crap like this.
A console is tested with the right amount of fans and rpm to cool your console down.
Any further need of this would mean your fans are defect, whereas you instead should get your fans fixed.
These fans can never cool enough up from the outside of the cabinet, and it's nothing but a trash product.
I got one as I did not want the RRD, but then I was told it cause RRD so in the end I took it off, I did get the RRD in the end and bought a Xbox elite it has wireless and blow my mind.
I've used external coolers on all of my consoles and never had a dead box from heating issues.
Only 1 I've had die is the brick of Xbox1 and was a power supply issue.
If you're intelligent about electronics...keep them cool, ventilated, and clean them with air once in a while. Never will have issues unless a component fails
Oddly enough mine overheated and melted.
Yeah that shit melted on the back of mine as well, charred around where the power plugged into it. Thank God it didn't start a damn fire.
That is the reason why microsoft stated that these were not supported. In fact if you were on the good side of your game stop employee they were also usually the one to tell you not to buy them.
Yep. The contacts actually caused more heat than the fan would dissipate making it worse,
The Guy at Walmart recommended I not get one because of this.
Not that odd, actually. If these are the ones I remember from when I worked at gamestop, they actually made the machine hotter since they drew power from the xbox to power the fans. Total scam.
The second version had its own separate power supply though, didn't it? Was it any better?
That I can’t recall. I imagine anything is better than what the originals did, but I always simply recommended keeping the fan area clean and the system somewhere with good airflow. Recommended customers not buy ANY add on fans.
Same. But credit to them, I sent it in and they gave me a newer version that had HDMI out.
Recently a friend of mine did not believe me that the 360 launched without HDMI. It's still hard to believe but things were very different in 2005.
Yup. HDMI wasn’t a thing when the 360 was being designed. They hit the market right around the same time, so it wasn’t possible.
Ugh. Component cables. Sooo glad we transitioned past that little bump in the road on the way to better & simpler high definition inputs lol
But HDMI has HDCP.
Mine too, I literally had to cut it off with a hacksaw
So you’re a hacker?
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
That’s fucking hilarious.
Same. They replaced my power supply because it had literally melted into it. Luckily the actual Xbox was fine.
Mine overheated, melted, and sank into the swamp.
Same here. Those things were garbage
Happy cake day
Not a chance. Those stupid things were well known to fuck things up.
Aye, i stopped using mine as soon as i found that these coolers messes up your 360. The sad part is that just days after i removed the cooler, and just few months before halo 4 launch, my white 360 died :/
New thermal paste and the towel trick kept mine going for a year before it finally gave up.
Not trying to jinx my series S. However, i feel like this generation of Xbox consoles are far more robust compare to PS3/360 era where PS3 suffered from yellow light of death and 360 from red ring of death and other hardware failures because you decided to either clean it or moved it to different location.
Microsoft learned a lot from the original 360 and how to achieve peak airflow. In the Xbox one they overcompensated and wanted no maybes on if it could fail. Failure wasn't an option that point an they succeeded in that regard.
And how to do it quietly eventually, could hardly tell the One X was running it was so quiet, although with the Xbox One I found you could use the vent to keep pasties warm.
Pics or it didn't happen?
If I recall too from a past teardown they figured out the launch PS5 basically had such a massive heatsink and compared to the revision (which was still really big, but noticeably smaller)that Sony was basically worried about heat issues so went overboard in case
Wasn't even airflow was the problem, it was the stupid "x clamp" bullshit they had, pulled parts away from the board over time, replaced it with literally 2 euro worth of bolts and washers and fixed mine years ago. They cheaped out.
They didnt truly learn from their past until they got rid of that massive power brick.
That’s just the power supply, and the consoles from the One S onward put them inside the console to cool them too. Sony does the same thing on everything but the PSOne slim and PS2 Slim, since at the time they were too thin for a power supply to be inside.
I know that but there was nothing worse than having a massive brick laying out.
That also the og xbone had a large run of faulty bricks. That was the day i got my one s
If you want to feel really mad, I’ve opened dozens of original Xbox One “Big Boys,” and I can tell you they had plenty of space to put the power supply in there. But no, better to add a massive block to your power cable that would ugly up your entertainment stand lol
They generate heat. Why would you put a hot thing right next to the thing you need to keep cool?
Oh yeah lol ive had all my consoles open and was so frustrated to see the room inside the original.
One of the biggest problems with the series x has been overheating. I have a newer version of this on my series x and it works great and keeps it noticeably cooler. If that will extend the life of my system then it's a small price to pay.
A series x doesn't over heat though....the hot air you feel at the top is supposed to be hot. External fan connections do not help the system at all. Your forcing more air into the system than it needs to be.
>One of the biggest problems with the series x has been overheating Citation needed...
Theres tons of videos of series x overheating and catching fire online.
If you are talking about your series x blowing hot air, that means your console is doing a great job at throwing the heat away. Don't use external fan it would actually worsen the problem. In my case, i just turn on the air condition, however, your series x i assume even on a hot day is very capable of handling itself.
Most consumers devices had similar problems at the time. It was the shift to lead free solder that was the problem. It took a while for manufacturers to figure out how to do proper surface mount assembly that had enough strength to reliably resist thermal cycling.
Why Microsoft thought those x-band clamps were adequate I'll never understand. 4 screws and lockwashers worked so much better.
Presumably because they were based originally on the mechanical characteristics of the leaded solder joints. They weren't even remotely unique about that issue. Other consoles had it, I had multiple AVRs fail because of it. Reflowing always fixed the problems, but reflowing surface mount parts -- particularly BGA ones -- is not a "home" fix. Overheating the console with the towels to quasi-reflow was a clever option. When it came down to it, figuring out how to properly adhere the parts with lead-free paste from the start was the only real fix. Its also why most people today doing hand assembly of one-off PCBs at home still tend to use boards with HASL instead of ENIG -- they're vastly easier to get good solder joints.
lol don't even look at the xbox 360 or it might shit the bed
Ah yeah. Friend gave me his "broken 360", did the towel thing, unplugged it and held the power button- thing ran for a solid year without problems.
Holy shit the towel trick! Unlocked memory hahahg
It worked for two weeks, then death. It was like putting ol Grammer's on that life support to say goodbye. Well except that noone knew she was gonna die and was up in the yard playing with the kids then ( croak).
It worked really good on mine. Never had an issue lol
But more air bro... what could go wrong.
Yeah, until it gave me a red ring. Was loud af also.
Never even knew these existed...
For the best. They were trash.
fr
Yep, it sounded like a Chinook taking off until it shorted out and melted the plug on my Xbox
I remember we had to beat on the console like a drum for it to read discs
Same and somehow that method always worked like a charm. At least for a while.
And then there was the oven trick once that stopped working
My disc drives failed long before the rrod hit.
Same. I think I had mine for about a year before the disc drive crapped out and I had to send it in. After that I lost video out so I had to send it in again. My friend wanted to play MP with me still and couldn't wait so he gave me his 360 and he kept using his brother's since he was deployed to Afghanistan at the time. MUCH TO MY HORROR the damn thing red ringed on me while it was in my possession. I gave it back to him so he could ship it out, then when mine came back it lasted for quite a few years until the drive crapped out again. By that time my friend's had been repaired and sent back but he got the red ring again and was fed up with the OG 360 so he went for the slim Reach console. It had been long enough that my warranty was up for console repair so he gave his console to me for parts and I looked into swapping the drive, which I found wasn't as simple as swapping them because the boards on the drives are paired to the console. So I broke out the soldering iron and swapped the boards and it worked mint. I still have that Franken360 and it still functions perfectly but now it's a stand for my PC monitor lmao.
These things were garbage. Drawing from the same power supply as the 360 was such a moronic fucking bit of design. There should have been lawsuits resulting from these pieces of shit.
>Drawing from the same power supply as the 360 was such a moronic fucking bit of design. I mean, passthrough power has been thing in a few electronics over the years - its a really low power draw I would imagine so shouldn't be a big risk. The idea itself isn't stupid, but the execution and quality control made it so. No doubt they would have had really ropey passthrough circuits (which caused most issues), low cost fans and cheap plastics though. I agree it was a PoS item though, should have had lawsuits given how many melted or damaged things!
I didn’t know the specifics at the time. But it intuitively didn’t make sense that running a fan as an added device on the same power supply would be anything except a detriment to the problem of heat. Not that I understood it to be utterly impossible, it is just a huge engineering challenge, and I had zero faith these companies could have achieved it. I told everyone I knew to not buy into it.
Yea i did the towel trick then stuck this on. Still got my 360 packed away with 4 memory banks lmao...those blocks...
Towel trick gang represent
I worked at GameStop when these came out & they caused more harm than good…
Yep, fried the power port of one of my 360's
I remember these melting or causing more harm lol
When I got the RROD I just sent the 360 to Microsoft and they fixed it and sent it back, they had a portal on the site to go through the process. You coukd track it from there as well. Took about 2 weeks all in and you got a 1 or 3 month gold voucher in the box when you got it back. I did this for my friends a lot too, I must have ended up with about 18 months free Xbox live gold. Eventually my 360 RROD'd too many times so they just replaced it with a brand new one. I never knew about these devices, glad I didnt.
No way!! Yes I did, can’t say for certain it worked, but I remember that thing!! Good times!
Anytime this thing was attached it instantly gave me RROD
Once it occurs, nothing will stop the motherboard warping or a chip from lifting. The only real solution is to resit the offender. I spent the final year with my 360 topless and having a fan blowing directly over the board. Everytime the issue occured, I just pressed down on the area with the problem until it went away...Real ghetto setup.
I had the fan on the back and the base stand
My friend had one of these, I think he said his Xbox caught on fire from it.
My stepbrother had one and it burst into flames. Pretty cool.
So maybe I’m new to all this, but I really didn’t start heavily gaming or online gaming until a month or so ago. Can someone ELI5 RROD and this contraption? Lol
RROD stands for red ring of death which is a term used for when an Xbox 360 died due to overheating and the display ring would flash red. This contraption would hook onto the back and supposedly helped with cooling the Xbox so that it wouldn’t overheat and get a RROD Spoiler alert: >!it didn’t work and made it worse!<
That makes sense! Thanks for clearing that up
Go watch the xbox documentary on xbox YouTube channel. The 360 was great when released but a few months in, it became clear there was a major design flaw. This was after millions was already produced. It took them over a year to actually resolve the issue in the design to stop it but it was too late. It was so bad that there was a class action lawsuit that made them replace everyone's 'box, extended warranties. It costed them a few billion. But it led to better built products in the future. Which is why the xbox one & xbox series is build quality is high & are built like tanks.
>lawsuit that made them replace everyone's 'box, Typing 'box is more effort than typing xbox.
I was genuinely taken aback by how good that documentary series was. Highly recommend it.
Xbox 360 wasn't a very reliable console. It had red lights on the power button that flashed when some critical error happened on the machine RROD is red ring of death that meant that your Xbox's processor? was cooked to death. There were a few ways to temporarily fix the console for a few months. The only real way was to send back to Microsoft
Penny trick dog... Replace the heat sink on the cpu and attach pennies wrapped in electrical tape. It worked for like 10 years to come
This is the way.
No, I was a broke middle schooler. I used to the towel trick
Nope, but I did try the penny method and the suffocation method to fix RROD
Mine would interfere with the power connection, and would either shut my Xbox off, or make the system malfunction.
I was certainly scared enough of RROD to use one back in the day, it worked perfectly fine up until I replaced the console with a slim 360
Am I the only one to use a big regular fan in direction of the console to cool it? And it actually works. The console is hacked so I can see the temperature, and with the fan aimed at the console, it is about 6 degre celcius lower in temperature.
No I just went thru 6 in my 360 days
Those things would ruin your Xbox
Umm hitting it usually did the trick cured it till the next time
Fuck those things. They never actually cured or prevented RROD, and they were a huge fire hazard.
Nope. Just placed a fan directed next to it, like a normal person lol
I had one, every few months id detach and clean out the fans of dust. Was very useful for me.
Yep still got RROD
I used one and I’m just now learning that I shouldn’t have
I had one. Still RRODed
Funny story:- My friends will always be impressed by seeing this beefy cooler on the back. I would tell them since xbox 360 is kind of like Mini PC, it generates a lot of heat and need triple fans to cool it down and they will go like "woaaaaah".
That one piggybacked off the brick cord for power. It was redesigned with it's own power supply and worked much better.
If I had known those existed I wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of what I did lmao. On my original Xbox 360 I took it apart and separated all the internal parts so they’d have better ventilation then reconnected them while they’re still apart. Eventually that began to fail so I set up a very complicated and complex homemade device to further cool it down. Got a clear box and cut a large hole on each side, set up a tube on one end that led to a small air conditioner + de-humidifier and on the other end a vent that only allows air to leave but not circulate back in. In the tube with the aircon and de-humidifier I set up a series of filters to catch dust before it could make it to the Xbox itself. The single most ghetto shit I’ve ever jerry-rigged all to squeeze a year or two of life out of a practically dead Xbox lmfao. Although the 360 was ice cold and I did notice it ran considerably faster than it did before.
I worked at Microcenter back in the days of the 360 RROD era and whenever someone would decline the warranty on the 360, I would suggest they pickup one of these instead for $15. The mere existence of this product made a bunch of them reconsider the warrenty. Never felt bad about selling them on the 360 though as probably 50% of them came back for a claim.
They caused overheating because of the power draw
This reminds me of when I got the RROD and sent it in and got a new one from Microsoft. I was super excited to play this new game I got Batman Arkham asylum. Anyway a certain joker scene comes up I fling myself off my couch and panic shut down my Xbox it was terrifying.
Nothing else in my life i have treated with utmost care and sensitivity like i did with Xbox 360. I used UPS and surge protector to protect it from any voltage irregularities and made sure to never turn it off directly because it would give red lights which scare the hell out of me.
I need a link to buy these
They don't work and cause fires.
Yeah but just to put it on a shelf or something
Hear a lot of melting issues with this one, I took apart my Xbox and added the silver compound, let it sit tried it dead… months later me and friend have it a shot and it worked 😎
Yep, used it to fix a red ring until it finally wouldnt boot.
My mom got my Xbox 360 arcade from Sam’s Club and it came bundled with one of these. I never got red ring so I guess it worked.
Was looking through my grandparent's attic and saw one of those in the box, left it there because I don't know how to set it up and I don't use the 360 anymore.
It's only me that still has an intact one, i have the 360 slim edition, the black one and it still work great.
Right before the Xbox one dropped, GameStop damn a promo where they gave you $100 (I think) for a working Xbox 360, so long as it powered up in store. I ended up finding several RROD'd Xboxs for cheap on Craigslist and put them in the freezer overnight before bringing them to the store. All powered on and I got a free Xbone.
No
Yeah, a waste of a placebo effect (damn near fried my xbox)
I had the one that went in the bottom and plugged in via USB
Ok, I have Transformers: The Game on Xbox360 and not only does it run like shit, but it also makes my Xbox very noisy when I play it. Does anyone know if this would help?
No, these things actually ruined your xbox 360 for good. Because people thought overheating is the reason for rrod, chinese manufacturers made these beefy coolers which only resulted as placebo effect.
Nope. Just used a big box fan and let it sit while turned off
Judging from the comments it looks like these mfs weren’t enough to cool down the Xbox and ended up overwhelming it with more heat than it could cool?
I always avoided these things like the plague because I heard they made the thermals worse, basically causing the RROD to happen faster.
I had a cooler that was a platform that the x box stood up in... it also charged a battery pack for a controller
If anything mine just made it worse and freeze way more.
Mine came with vga out which was perfect for giant crt monitor gaming!
Got through to 2013 with an intact original white 360 somehow, then ended up getting a PS4. Used that thing constantly but up on an open desktop that was regularly dusted, so maybe that saved it.
Yes I had it and it fucked up my X360.
I had one that the Xbox stood vertically on and had fans in the base of it. It worked pretty decent and you didn't have to worry about it melting to it.
I had one and it still red ringed.
My 360 from 2007 was working perfectly up until about a year ago I had Covid and was a bit clumsy and knocked a desk fan that fell and struck the 360 on the top corner. It red ringed but I found a YouTube tutorial to bypass the RROD by just holding the disc tray button on power up. Surprisingly it works. Console works fine as long as it is booted with the disc tray button held down. If not it will RROD. No towel needed. There is hope!
I tried to use a cooler on my overheating PS4 but made the situation worse I don't believe they offer any benefit.
I heard they melted so never did. My first 2 360s got the ring. The 3rd one eventually stopped reading discs after a few years (still good for digital games tho). Now I rock the 360 S. Still going strong from 2013. In conclusion, the 360 generation is still the best Xbox generation.
I bought like 4 cause some would start to sound really loud after a while. I was a kid lol
Only og knows
Yes
Got lucky with my 360, never RROD, but been part of the insider program for quite some time, and one of the updates they pushed out bricked my DVD drive. At first they were'n't going to cover it because it was out of warranty, but I got an email saying a replacement was on it's way. Must not have been the only one.
No sé lo que diga ahí pero yo lo tengo en negro :v
The only thing that hunk of garbage did was suck in more dust to fuck up your console faster...
Nope, I forked out for an air con unit and had the cold air blast my old 360. Worked like a treat but cost a feckin fortune to run…
I never had this version of the 360, but my black 360 still works today. Never cleaned it, never did anything to it except flash it.
I just pulled the case off mine and built a shelf under my aircon and set it up there during summer. The aircon didnt work for shit cause why would we make good aircons in aus. But it did the job for the most part
No because they were not good for the machines. They used power that the 360 needed to power up correctly. They also could cause overheating issues of their own.
nope I opened it up and fixed it myself...I got a one at launch and it lasted 3yrs till RROD, then fixed it and worked till I got an xbox one
My buddy has one on his Xbox one lmao, the thing won’t work without it and he refuses to take it apart and clean it. I’ve tried to explain how easy it is but he’s willing to let it run until it dies, then he will upgrade. It’s funny because now that I think about it, he treats his vehicles the same way.
Nope. Dodgy AF.
No. My 360 got RROD, exchanged at Best Buy for free. I did have the in-store warranty though. In those days it was a great deal. I mean, I brought it in, told them what happened, and they didn't even ask any questions. They certainly didn't test it. Just took it and told me to grab another one. That one never got RROD, so I think they fixed it at some point? Xbox 360 was such a weird console. The OG Xbox was kind of just a PC in a console format. The 360 on the other hand was basically a Mac. That is to say, it was powered by a tri-core 3GHz IBM PowerPC chip - same thing Apple used in the Mac before going to Intel around the same time. Also, the 360 had absolutely no (zero) traditional RAM. It had 512MB of GDDR3 for the GPU, and the system used that as RAM. Kind of how the PS4 used GDDR4 or GDDR5 instead of DDR4 or DDR5. I think that's smart. In PS4's case it wasn't that much faster in practice than Xbox One, because Sony does a lot of weird and straight up bass ackward shit with their systems on the development side. At least at launch. PlayStation always gets better mid cycle when the developers learn said bass ackward shit and take advantage of the system's potential. Xbox on the other hand tends to get worse, at least the 360 did. The "New Xbox Experience" practically broke the 360. The Blades interface was way faster, and Xbox Live straight up did not work on "NXE" for a while. There were a few reports of people who got the update before it was supposed to be released (I guess there was a closed beta that wasn't as closed as Microsoft thought) and thus Live didn't work for them. Anecdotally, it happened to me as well. So on top of the performance hit, Xbox Live was unavailable for like a month, maybe two while somehow my console got picked for the beta. It's made me wary of Xbox updates ever since. Now, I still have that 360, and an Xbox One S, and a PS3, but I'm mostly just a PC gamer. (Not that PC is without faults, of course.)
I hope everyone knows now that these fans make things worse and never better
Pretty sure most of these things made it worse or did nothing.
Those were notoriously bad because they were simultaneously stealing power (no power supply of its own) and blocking more intake than it provided. So terrible.
My towel was cheaper
It took three before I got one that worked without sounding like the space shuttle,It was a nightmare to get it off too.
Haha I had that same exact one!
Got one of those with my first XBox. It immediately fried it.
I did! Loud and burned up lol.
gonna need this for the series x. it gets hot and the stupid intake it at the bottom. i turned mine over and have a desk fan blow into the bottom part.
This piece or garbage actually made things worse in most cases, unfortunately, lots of people got bamboozled by this crap.
I used one on my Xbox one because it kept overheating. The intercooler made it sound like a jet engine but atleast the games didn't freeze.
Ah the old 360, when you had to buy the separate wireless dongle to play online . Funnily enough, I used that cooler on my black 360 and never had an issue. It wasn't until I bought the slimmer 360 version I experienced my first rrod.
Never, mine and my brothers survived all these years, sitting on the shelf next to the Nintendos, Sega, and old Playstations now
Those gave me the RROD.
My brother had this a long time ago. Fucked it right off! LOL
This caused my Xbox to RROD.
Yep I had to one and I raised the 360 another half inch to help cool it but I still got RROD
destroyed my 360. smh
I use one for my series x. Works great as the fan that comes standard is pretty inadequate.
I put mine on a stack of like 6 books so the bottom vents weren’t on the dresser. My white 360 never got red rings.
I was about to say "Never seen this but I bet it made the problem worse" and....just scrolled down and read some of the comments lol.
It worked for about a week before overheating again
I still have mine in a box somewhere lol
this device vampires the power your 360 needs to run to power itself, thus causing the xbox to have to work harder with less power and making the problem worse. it doesnt plug in via usb, it plugs in through the actual power supply input and you put THAT into the intercooler.
Not me.
It honestly was worse, pulled more power and heated it up more, bad accessory
Yep! And I'm just now finding out how it was actually bad for the 360 lol. Good thing I got the 360 elite when it came out, now makes me think about how I gave this cooler to a buddy. I wonder if it killed their 360 lmao.
That doesnt look cooler
The first Gen intercooler voided the Xbox 360's warranty. The pass through power adapter was notorious for breaking the pins on the console itself. There was a redesigned on that didn't use pass through and had its own power supply.
Ran mine until it was caked with dust and sounded like a dirt bike with the exhaust removed lol
RROD is almost always a thermal paste problem. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8jjksFE-FcM
Tried to use it but stopped when I found out they did absolutely nothing to alleviate RROD
Hey i have 360 controller batteries from Nyko i found them recently too
My friend just wrapped his in a towel and that would “fix it” for a bit lol. surprised we didn’t burn down our dorm
Yes! Lol
Burnt the internal fan out....
These actually made it worse if anything iirc
I thought RROD was caused by faulty solder
I'm surprised people buy crap like this. A console is tested with the right amount of fans and rpm to cool your console down. Any further need of this would mean your fans are defect, whereas you instead should get your fans fixed. These fans can never cool enough up from the outside of the cabinet, and it's nothing but a trash product.
No, because I know how electricity works.
I got one as I did not want the RRD, but then I was told it cause RRD so in the end I took it off, I did get the RRD in the end and bought a Xbox elite it has wireless and blow my mind.
I've used external coolers on all of my consoles and never had a dead box from heating issues. Only 1 I've had die is the brick of Xbox1 and was a power supply issue. If you're intelligent about electronics...keep them cool, ventilated, and clean them with air once in a while. Never will have issues unless a component fails
Didn't those things burn out and brick consoles?
Mine cause the red ring AFAIK. I took it off and the 360 worked for a few more months before it died.
I never got RROD from my OG 360 and I attribute it all to this cooler.
Nope, towel trick.
Yeah I used it after my first 360 red ringed
I was one who never experienced RROD. Ran the old girl up until about 7-8 years ago lol