The Xbox 360 is Now Twenty Years Old - I am old and so are you.

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The Last Stand dijo:
Both.
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Well the original Xbox One dashboard was terrible. It betrayed everything they had built prior. It didn't even have a guide, thinking you'd go back to the dashboard to do anything, which was absolute cancer. Even party chat didn't work properly and probably took years off my life trying to troubleshoot their broken bullshit.

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Today, the current dash is pretty usable. Everything is in the guide (Xbox button), where it should be. And it functions pretty much like the 360 guide.
 
The Ugly One dijo:
The EPA had just banned lead solder, and electronics companies were still figuring out how to make reasonably durable electronics with the new stuff (which isn't any better for the environment). Microsoft also didn't have good thermal engineering in their box; the PS3's internals stayed much more uniformly cool.
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To expand on this. The problem was that MS employed some fag Italian designer to design the case. The internal hardware came after *that* and they were left with a SoC that was impossible to cool inside the case design they got. What's worse is that in the first 2 initial releases they used aluminum heatsinks that failed to cool the chips even more. Only in Jasper did they finally budge and include a copper radiator, but they managed to fumble even that, because now the HANA chip (the internal HDMI encoder) was now a BGA chips instead of a TSOP, and it was straight under the heat tunnel, making IT overheat and desolder from the board.

This is why some mods would make a huge hole for a on-SOC cooler that pretty much mitigated most thermal stress, and why future Xbox ones did the exact same thing

Good times
 
Atlas Sneezed dijo:
To expand on this. The problem was that MS employed some fag Italian designer to design the case. The internal hardware came after *that* and they were left with a SoC that was impossible to cool inside the case design they got. What's worse is that in the first 2 initial releases they used aluminum heatsinks that failed to cool the chips even more. Only in Jasper did they finally budge and include a copper radiator, but they managed to fumble even that, because now the HANA chip (the internal HDMI encoder) was now a BGA chips instead of a TSOP, and it was straight under the heat tunnel, making IT overheat and desolder from the board.
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Another important detail, the early 2000s hit an important inflection point in computer design where compact machines were getting hot enough that you could no longer just eyeball fan, vent, & vane placement. You need someone experienced in heat transfer design, preferably equipped with professional simulation tools like Flotherm, to eliminate hotspots and ensure efficient flow. I can't prove anything without an engineer from the time leaking info, but the 360's guts look an awful lot like "just eyeball it" design, while the PS3 was clearly designed by someone who knew what they were doing. If they weren't using thermal analysis software, then they were just very, very experienced and clever.
 
The Ugly One dijo:
Another important detail, the early 2000s hit an important inflection point in computer design where compact machines were getting hot enough that you could no longer just eyeball fan, vent, & vane placement. You need someone experienced in heat transfer design, preferably equipped with professional simulation tools like Flotherm, to eliminate hotspots and ensure efficient flow. I can't prove anything without an engineer from the time leaking info, but the 360's guts look an awful lot like "just eyeball it" design, while the PS3 was clearly designed by someone who knew what they were doing. If they weren't using thermal analysis software, then they were just very, very experienced and clever.
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i have the zephyr where they added the extra heatsink protruding out from the main one, like some engineers just said "eh fuck it good enough"
 
The Ugly One dijo:
2000s hit an important inflection point in computer design where compact machines were getting hot enough that you could no longer just eyeball fan, vent, & vane placement
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Yes but not in this case. The PPC chip they used from IBM just sucked balls. If you look into history, the same architecture (but a different configuration) - PPC 970 was used in PowerMacs G5 and they were famous for being first desktop PCs with watercooling and the case was long sought after with modders for it's excellent wind tunnel design. And that was a single core variant. Then IBM and Microsoft thought it'd be cool to put a 3-core+GPU design on a single chip and could cool that with two blower fans and an aluminum heatsink.

Same 90nm SOI process on both of them.

Edit: I fucked up, the CPU+GPU combo were much later on the slims on a 45nm node. But the comparison still stands and even in a dual chip design they shared the radiator
The Ugly One dijo:
I can't prove anything without an engineer from the time leaking info, but the 360's guts look an awful lot like "just eyeball it" design, while the PS3 was clearly designed by someone who knew what they were doing.
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No, in fact we have proof it was the exact opposite. Sony when releasing the PS5 admitted outright they were eyeballing cooling up until and including the PS4 Pro (I could find you the video if you really want). On the other side of the spectrum, it's like I said, the engineers got put in front of an impossible task of sticking something in a case that was designed much earlier and wasn't made for the high TDP they ended up with. That plus the thermal flexing of the board and the then-unknown new ROHS *underfill* chemistry fucked them over royally and kept doing it until the die-shrink arrived.

In fact now in hindsight we know that the PS3 didn't fare much better in the long run, with all fats *first* dying of TOKINs (lots of consoles got trashed because of them unfortunately - they could've been saved), but then the exact same underfill killed of the RSXes, and some modders to this day transplant die-shrunk Nvidia chips to the OG motherboards, also delidding the Cell while they're at it to prolong it's life.
 
Última edición:
Going to ackshually here and say that it wasn’t even the solder joints themselves breaking on their own, the joints broke due to a period of a few years with a change in underfill formulations that weren’t heat tolerant and gave more room for heat deformation under the processors. The irony here is the CPU is generally the more stable part in RROD situations because it got a full size cooler and not just a heat plate under a DVD drive (and then a heat plate with a random heat pipe extension piece) which makes the CPU complaints atm funny.

Also on the CPU note, it’s even funnier to compare it to a G5 because it’s one big fuck you to Apple courtesy of IBM- a tricore 3GHz lower node size PPC970 derivative, literally everything Apple wanted for three years by that point.
 
Enig dijo:
the solder joints themselves breaking on their own, the joints broke due to a period of a few years with a change in underfill formulations that weren’t heat tolerant and gave more room for heat deformation under the processors.
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It was multiple things at the same time. The board was flexing which killed the BGA balls on the interposer. At the same time the underfill was itself flexing the balls under the silicon connecting to the interposer because of thermal stress.

This is why X-Clamps worked but only for some and only for some time.

Enig dijo:
tricore 3GHz lower node size PPC970 derivative
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No, as I just said initially they were on the same 90nm SOI node as Apple's G5. The 65nm die shrink was on Falcon (and Jasper). And Falcons still very much red ringed because only one chip got the copper radiator, connected by an aluminum heatpipe.

Only by Jasper did the situation get somewhat stable. But Jasper was how many years into the console lifecycle?

But you know what I really hate about those consoles? The FUCKING POWER SUPPLY. Big, chunky, a cable that could kill, and the GODDAMN FAN inside of it. Years later I got myself a slim because hey, those slims have built in wifi, are smaller, have better cooling and are quieter. Cool. I turn the thing on and only then did I immediately remember - the fucking PSU has a fan, and it's VERY audible.
 
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Atlas Sneezed dijo:
Yes but not in this case. The PPC chip they used from IBM just sucked balls.
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The Xbox 360 never drew more than about 185W total under load. This is a pedestrian level of cooling these days, but back then, there was way less know-how. It wasn't a time to cut corners or slap something together. The PS3 ran even hotter.

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If 360 engineers were using CFD tool to design the machine, they were pajeets or interns, because it's just badly done. Impressive that Sony got by on know-how. The fan was clever at the time.

Atlas Sneezed dijo:
In fact now in hindsight we know that the PS3 didn't fare much better in the long run
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Still tended to last quite a bit longer. There was still a lot to learn.
 
I'm thinking seriously about buying one of these consoles or a PS3 because i want to play some games that never got ported to the PS4 like the Skate trilogy or GTA IV (and also because my PC is fucking ass and i can't emulate shit)

The PS3 has free online and it's very easy to mod but the Xbox 360 just recently got a new modding method that doesn't require a custom chip or soldering something to the motherboard but you still need to pay for playing online.

IDK man... (:_(
 
Adolf Kitler dijo:
The PS3 has free online and it's very easy to mod but the Xbox 360 just recently got a new modding method that doesn't require a custom chip or soldering something to the motherboard but you still need to pay for playing online.
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Bro, all the multiplayer games worth playing are 15+ years old; they are either dead (shutdown servers/no players) or filled with hackers (GTAIV, CoD, etc.)
Skate 2, for example, was shut down 4 years ago. You don't need Xbox Live Gold.
 
I think the thing that stopped me from really getting into the 360 besides buying and enjoying the core exclusives (halo, gears, mass effect) was the whole battery's bullshit. When did they start releasing chargeable controllers?
 
#lurker dijo:
Bro, all the multiplayer games worth playing are 15+ years old; they are either dead (shutdown servers/no players) or filled with hackers (GTAIV, CoD, etc.)
Skate 2, for example, was shut down 4 years ago. You don't need Xbox Live Gold.
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The 360 could officially be called abandoned at this point. The 360 store is shut down and only works to re-download already owned media (but some media are actually missing and can't be downloaded again currently). Almost all multiplayer games have their servers down. Some games that are physical won't patch to the newest version from the servers. And every once in a while the servers storing the old games go offline and Microsoft takes forever to restore them.
Michael Wade dijo:
I think the thing that stopped me from really getting into the 360 besides buying and enjoying the core exclusives (halo, gears, mass effect) was the whole battery's bullshit. When did they start releasing chargeable controllers?
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The 360 had an official wired controller. It was so good that the U.S. military still uses it for drone and torpedo controlling. The current Xbox Series do not have an official wired controller but there are some third party wired controllers that are close enough to being replicas of the default wireless one.
 
TheHarbinger dijo:
The 360 could officially be called abandoned at this point. The 360 store is shut down and only works to re-download already owned media (but some media are actually missing and can't be downloaded again currently). Almost all multiplayer games have their servers down. Some games that are physical won't patch to the newest version from the servers. And every once in a while the servers storing the old games go offline and Microsoft takes forever to restore them.
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This is pretty much why I'll (mournfully) agree that the 360 is "retro". Not only is it out of production as a console and with no more new games being made for it, but there's no more real online services for it anymore. At least so many of them were made, along with some third party parts manufacturers, that hopefully we'll be able to keep our 360s running for a long, long time...
 
#lurker dijo:
Bro, all the multiplayer games worth playing are 15+ years old; they are either dead (shutdown servers/no players) or filled with hackers (GTAIV, CoD, etc.)
Skate 2, for example, was shut down 4 years ago. You don't need Xbox Live Gold.
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What I will give the PS3 community is their revival servers for various games where all you'd need to do is to change your DNS address to access those new servers.
 
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