Gaming Room

3 times in 2 years the Xbox 360 has given me the 3 flashing red light wink of doom. Once was a little over 2 months after the Console was purchased.

Which was ok because the game store just gave me a straight off replacement because it was still under warranty.

But if the Warranty is up, you have limited and Expensive options.

There is a cost of over $100 to send your console back to Microsoft, plus a cost of two weeks valuable, Game downtime.

From what I have heard, that when the repair was carried out, the Xbox 360 showed its 3 flashing red light's again after only a couple of weeks.

So what causes the Hardware failure on the Xbox 360?

The root cause for the ring of death is the design of the heat sinks, mainly the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).

The GPU Heat sink is underneath the DVD drive of the console, and because of this the heat sink is too small for the heat output of the GPU core. Its only 10mm (3/8) High. On the other hand, the CPU is about 50mm (2) High and is liquid cooled.

In the Xbox 360 Elite, Microsoft altered the design of the cooling system so that the Liquid cooling Extend's beyond the CPU to the GPU. This makes the console dissipate the Heat better and therefore does not overheat to the same extent.

So the effect of the heat generated is the warping of the motherboard, which cracks the lead free solder joints, causing the red ring of death.

I searched far and wide for a 'free' solution (towel trick) but ended up creating irreparable damage to my 360 and I had to live with a permanent 3 red lights, or as i like to call it, the Devil's Halo!

I was looking for Valuable information. But if you want that, there has to be a Value on it. (i.e. you gotta pay for it), but if it saves your beloved Xbox, its going to save you a lot of money.

The guides available were countless, I didn't think there would be so many. Having the fix done to your console takes Half an hour - say some guides. And some say two hours.

While most of the guides good offer explanations and step by step instructions, there are some guides that give you summarized information of the top guides out there.

To do the fix the 1st time myself did take the guts of 2 hours, and I have an electronic engineering degree! So how is someone who is not technically savvy, fix it in 30 minutes? So what I did was, create my very own web page to review the best guides, and give you my top 3.

Visit the link below to reveal the top three available on the Web.