360 failure rate?

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=167269

"30-33%". I didn't know it was that serious. My first 360 started locking up last year during my constant Gears of War fest. My second one is still alive and kicking due to the fact that I've hardly touched it ever since I got the Wii. Most people I know haven't really had much issues with their 360 except for the occasional lockups every few days or so, but I keep hearing about that 3 rings O death on the web.

Anyone else had any issues or is this just a simple fluke of bad luck?

To quote Tycho from Penny Arcade "When it happens to you, it might as well be 100%"

That sounds too high to be believed (I can't get to the article though). A failure rate that high would mean 3 million units went bad.

I've only seen one in use though, and my kids pound on it every day since Christmas.

I'm curious as to what revisions of the hardware are being returned, are they the original ones, newer ones, the elite ones?

Another article on it. That's a lot of money...

http://money.cnn.com/2007/07/05/technology/microsoft_charge.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes

Had my 360 since xmas. Oblivion will sometimes lock up but that's the only prob I have ever had. I also have a PS2 and it has locked up a few times playing Sly Cooper 2.

I think early 360's had problems but MS, in their defense, did extend the warranty and it sounds like they are doing the right thing by most customers.

I think the 360 was rushed. The original xbox still had some life in it and MS jumped the gun by about a year. That said, I love my 360, like my PS2 and returned my WII.

Once gimmick wears off there is just not enough to recommend the WII unless you just love Nintendo and MUST own one for no other reason than it is Nintendo.

People will hate me, but after a week no one in my house was playing the WII. They'd show it off for a few minutes, say cool and laugh and then fire up the PS2 for some DDR (my kids are all girls).

I guess were are just weird ...

Allan

You're not, but the fanbois will tell you otherwise.

It's bad enough that MS have put aside $1billion to cover the new extended warranty system.

My fiancées little brother has an XBOX 360 and a couple of days ago it started to lock up after a few minutes of gaming. It's out of warranty now but he didn't use it that much either.

I took the thing apart and found that the GPU heatsink is no longer good enough for some reason, as if I hang the DVDROM (which sits over the top of it) over the side of the 360 giving the GPU heatsink more space to breath the 360 works 100% with no problems.

I see MS have changed this heatsink in newer revisions and added a secondary heatsink to the GPU which sits away from the DVDROM via a heat pipe.

So I'm hoping I can source these newer versions somehow and fit it myself without his parents having to fork out £90 which MS have quoted them.

Well, now it's back IN warranty ;)

Mine started locking up with Test Drive Unlimited, I put it down to the game- I replaced the disk and all was well for a while, then it started to freeze again. I figured it was just Microsofts way- "if it crashes less than once every 6 hours then it's not broken." (reduce time period for different systems/software they release ;) )

So, when the opportunity arrose to swap my Xbox360 for a Wii, I jumped on it.

so now my Xbox360 is an XXbox360 ,and my Wii Wrocks.

Apparently Microsoft is now offering 3 year warranties - all costs paid (repair and courier) for by Microsoft plus they are going to return any costs users have previously incurred (retrospectly) to get their XBOX's fixed.

Open letter here:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/petermooreletter.htm

Full article:
http://bink.nu/Article10452.bink

Wow. 24 billion dollars in the hole already and now an extended warranty? One wonders when the shareholders are going to start screaming havok...

24 billion dollars? Where did you get that figure?

Well that is a good thing. But I hear the turn around rate for recieving the "repaired" refurbished 360s can take as long as a month+. Someone even made a ridiculous suggestion that "to be on the safe side", buy 2 360s incase one needs to be sent out for repairs, you'll still have the other to use. Needless to say, I think I'll just stick it out with my one for now and cross my fingers that it won't crapped out.

BTW, anyone know if this failure rate is as high as the early PS2s? I recall they were having issues back then too but can't quite recall the severity.

..now you guys know why PS3 going to win this race...as i said, I have it and so far no issues with it..and graphics just rocks..

> I have it and so far no issues with it..

Yup - both of you PS3 owners are riding high...

My mate has a 360, he bought one after his brother bought one as he liked it, so they have 1 each in the same house. His brother's died a month ago, and hasn't bothered to send it back. Now they both use his X-Box360.

That one started crashing and having problems too, after only 5 months. He complains to me about it and I just say what do you expect you bought a shitty Microsoft product. I told him not to buy one, soon they'll have 2 novelty upright Kettles. You'd have thought he'd have learned wouldn't you with all the crashes his original X-Box gave him.

I've no sympathy whatsoever.

Someone told me the problem is actually caused by the power cord not fitting tightly enough in it's sockets and the red lights are acutually just a sign of too little power. I didn't get to try it when my went red so I don't know how true that is.

LOL!!!!! But atleast they're still riding.

Sony are notorious for cheap ass lens that generally need replacing after 3-4 years, but the rest of the hardware is generally rock solid.


A mate of mine had dud DDR2/DDR3/whateveritis memory on his gfx card, but that's an nVidia thing ;]

My Xbox360: 21 games, 16 finished to 'completion'. 15 months. About five lockups overall. Maybe I'm just lucky...

Lucky? I remember a time when consoles never crashed. Thanks MS! :/

> I remember a time when consoles never crashed. Thanks MS!

And Sony, only system I never had crash was the Gamecube, and my old 2600.

the GC crashed, even came up with an appology and told you to read the manual. Resetting it fixed that though.

NES was bad, even got a reputation for it:



my Atari crashed too, but maybe thats because I was 4 years old and decided it needed a bath....

Hmm. I never had a NES.

Well, having an X360, PS2, and a Wii, I can't complain about either one. All three have served me very well. Now that Nintendo's got more M-rated games on the Wii than the GameCube had during in its entire lifespan, I would like to think that I have it made. To me, the game that really gets me using the Wii, has to be The Godfather Blackhand Edition. By far and away the one that gets me playing. I'm deeply considering RE4 for the Wii, tho, having played the GC version, I MAY upgrade to the Wii version of the game.

Anyway, back on topic. As far as the X360 failure rates, mine hasn't conked out on me yet. The only trouble was with Saints Row when it kept locking up with all that activity all in one area, and of course, the glitches from the game itself. Outside of that, nothing too serious to report.

Me too. However, from what I hear they haven't upgraded any of the graphics from the GC version - it's just a tweaked control system. But then I've never played any RE game, so am hoping to be in for a treat when I do get it.

The Edge review of the Wii edition this month was interesting - while criticising it for being just a port, it's still a great game, now being brought to a new audience (equivalient of audio ro video re-mastering if you like), so still got 9/10. There are plenty of arguments about lack of AAA games on Wii, but this does seem to be another one, even if the traditional hardcore gamers have all played it before.

Microsoft's failure rate seemed worse than expected. How would you compare this to Sony's PS3 failure rate? Anyone have any stats on that one?

Skip the others and just try out RE4. It IS that good. There was even a thread about this game a little while ago.


No stats but according to article : "less than one percent". http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=167269

Wow, those guys really slate the X-Box 360, it's nothing I've not heard before though.

It's funny really because as a kid I used to cry my eyes out when my Amstrad would crash or the games wouldn't load.
The Amiga crashed, PCs crashed, the rule was:- if it's got a keyboard it'll crash at some point, if it's got a joypad it won't. And then you just move on and accept it.

My 10 or so consoles that I own have rarely ever crashed, and if they did it was always the fault of the game not the console. Sure my PS1 lens wore out and so did my PS2 lens but each served me 7-8 years of constant daily usage. But with moving parts such as CD drives, of course they'll fail one day. The average PC drive as a comparison lasts me 2~4 years and those are used maybe like once a day to burn a new disk, copy some files. Or maybe not used in weeks, so they've no excuse for failing to read disks so quickly.

So in this respect, you've got to hand it to Microsoft though, they succesfully brought all the best features of Windows into the console world, bugs, shoddily tested software and unreliablity with the hardware.
The sooner Microsoft pull out of the console wars the better as far as I'm concerned.

It's the only 20-year old piece of technology in the house that I can think of that still works...

...also the only console I own.

Heretic!

Actually I can't think of any time that the Amiga hardware or OS1.x crashed.

Guru Meditation #84010007.00C13870

The problem with Amiga OS was that there was no memory protection, meaning that any program could screw around with other programs' memory, leading to a crash.

(unreleated but annoying: the occasional complete lock-up, after which only a CTRL-A-A could get you out of... At which point the OS would kill the various processes. If the problem process was killed the machine would start responding again, but at that point there was nothing you could do to prevent the reboot that would kick in two seconds later...)

Guru Meditations caused by third party software, sure, but I stand by my comment.

Hmm, well, just as long as you use surge protection as well as keep the X360 on an open shelf in a horizontal position, then I don't see any trouble in the X360 lasting longer that way... It's people that are dumb enough to plug it directly in the wall and having it sit vertically is when they start getting problems. At least that's what Microsoft tends to think.

Well my first one went dead and I had use a surge protector and had sit horizontally. Plus, while its not a big deal, people shouldn't be required to do that anyways.

Well since the PS3 and Wii have a massively lower failure rate, then the logical conclusion to what you're saying is that all the dumb people are buying X360's and the smart people are buying PS3's and Wii's. Hmm.. you may be right.

LOL, they have already a Wiki about XBOX 360 failure rates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

I also read in the news few days ago that Microsoft lost a billion dollar from the XBOX 360 returns because they all had red lights (total hardware failure). The Wiki states a 1.5 billion dollar loss also.

I personally think this is good news, since game developers and customers should slowly get rid of Microsoft and Windows, and start moving towards Linux and MacOS X, and hopefully Amiga "Reborn" in the future (after all Blitz BASIC was originally developed for the Amiga: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlitzMAX ).

No, I was mentioning what MICROSOFT thought the problem was blamed on, not me...

Sorry about that, but with that stupid offshore tech support of theirs, it seems like we may not know the true cause. I'm not too sure if that question was asked at E3 to Peter Moore or not... Wonder what he may have said about that stuff.

Its clear that the PS3 can't have had the same failure rate as the PS2 (which had a 50%+ failure rate on serie 1 and 2 due to the plastic lense for laser focus which just deformed ... had one of those as well that needed to be put into a specific angle to work for more than 4 hours), simply because they had to push it back half a year in europe to deliver enough consoles to JP and US due to the failure rate on BR lasers ... and I am not fully sure if the ones used now won't just die soon ... the material used is a little critical and potentially could die after a few tousand hours.

While Sony blamed technical problems in their manufacturing process, I think you'll find it was actually the PS2 hardware chip (PS2 on one chip) they simply couldn't manufacture fast enough, hence the Euro release having software emulation (that was not even ready at launch).

Well, the original Xbox had problems with the power supply, IIRC... I was wondering if that "brick" for the X360 may have been the cause of the RRoD, knowing that history.