360 fixed!

[BuzzKillington]

Well, I thought about it and decided to get my $120 dollars back from microsoft to have my 360 fixed and take my chances at fixing it myself.

I opened it up and there was some hardened thermal paste on the GPU. I removed both heatsinks, cleaned off all of the old paste with rubbing alcohol and "goo-gone", regreased 'em with some arctic silver 5 I had laying around and went to put the heatsinks back on. Well, it was then when I realized how frigging hard it was to reinstall the xclamps!

I took the heatsinks back off and let the grease dry before removing it again. I ordered a set of screws, washers and nylon washers on ebay for a few bucks. I had also ordered a fan upgrade with turbo switch a couple days before my 360 died so maybe the 360 just wanted it's upgrade pronto.

It was an easy project once the screws came in. For $85 less than what M$ wanted to charge me for a fix, I upgraded to a quieter blue LED fan with more flow, a stealthed turbo button behind the memory card door (just press the door and it acts as a button), better thermal paste AND rubber washers and bands to help eliminate the drive vibration.

:banana:

[slaveofconvention]

Have you re-tightened the screws since the first time? A lot of these rrod fixes don't last past the first week because people miss this step. In a nutshell, the GPU gets hot enough to melt the solder holding it down when the TIM hardens. By reapplying it, you do get it working again but for a long term fix, it's best to run it (hard) for an hour (ish) - basically long enough to soften the solder, then retighten the screws, cramping the solder down solid - this will, hopefully, pull the GPU back down a tiny fraction, making the repair permanent. Otherwise what can happen is the GPU still heats up the solder to the point where you get another break.