Strange 360 love

The Towel Trick fixes 360’s? « The Xbox Domain

Well, since, we’re on the topic of 360s I thought I’d throw in my two cents on one of the hot articles spreading around. The gist is that wrapping your towel around your xbox will solve the ROD (ring of death) problem.

The ring of death is essentially three red lights that usually mean a bricked* box.

My guess is that either:

1. The heat caused by the towel wrap is causing internal components to expand and therefore fixing weak contact points, or…
2. the heat is causing the thermal paste to better adhere to the processor. It’s a stretch, but one of the causes of the ROD is shotty application of thermal paste to the cpu and gpu. This is the stuff that transfers heat from your chips to your heat sinks. I redid the stuff on my 360 and the heat sinks pull off a lot more heat now. I used Arctic Silver 5 which is designed for high end processors. Look at their manual and it’ll tell you:

Important Reminder:

Due to the unique shape and sizes of the particles in Arctic Silver
5’s conductive matrix, it will take a up to 200 hours and several
thermal cycles to achieve maximum particle to particle thermal conduction and for the heat sink to CPU interface to reach maximum conductivity. (This period will be longer in a system without a fan on the heat sink or with a low speed fan on the heat sink.) On systems measuring actual
internal core temperatures via the CPU’s internal diode, the measured temperature will often drop 2C to 5C over this “break-in” period. This break-in will occur during the normal use of the computer as long as the computer is turned off from time to time and the interface is allowed to cool to room temperature. Once the break-in is complete, the computer can be left on if desired.

The towel wrap and cool method may be doing what Microsoft should be doing at the factory.

*What is bricked? Simple. What does a brick do?

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