Has Anyone Noticed console failure rate

Anyone who believes the NES was a well-made solid piece of kit that never failed really is living in a magical fantasy world.

Those cartridge connectors were useless! The grey flashing screen of sorrow and the constant blowing out of cartridges must be the bane of any retro gamers' existence.

 

My PS3 is like a rock. My XB360 failed 3 times.

As Assembler said, complexity causes issues.

 

I wonder if they put like a timer in it or something. That could be something. What is it, Like hidden inside the motherboard? No wonder something always breaks on the 360, Its probably ment to break so people have to pay more! OH: OH:

 

Lol, thats what parents say! Nothing like losing money!

 

Let's not forget that some people treat things like crap too. I try to avoid used games when I can (especially from a chain store), since about half of them look like someone took a belt-sander to them. Consoles usually get shoved (literally) into a corner somewhere, with improper ventilation or cleaning.

 

The Xbox 360 is simply a defective piece of QA. But since people buy it like crazy anyway, MS doesn't really care. Why should they? At this point, years after it came out and after several revisions, if they did care the thing would be rock solid by now. The machine is just cheap hardware built quick with minimum R&D and parts.

The "proper cooling setup" argument is placebo IMO. There's no proof that better external cooling would have saved a machine that died, as far as I know. Isn't one big reason for the console failures a mechanical problem with ROHS solder balls on the GPU & CPU? 360's just a ticking timebomb really.

A friend of mine has a launch 360 that works fine yet. It's undoubtedly a combination of luck of the draw and that he basically hasn't played it like ever (I actually borrowed it for a year). There is a catch to its "flawless functionality" and that is the the piece of trash DVDROM that will spin out DVDs pretty often. My bro's more recent model does the same thing. That right there is insane because PC DVDROMs go for ~$20 (and have for years) and are usually rock solid hardware. Big 'ol MS can't source a decent DVDROM? Yeah right. Gee I wonder what the motives are there.

My personal first-hand experiences with console problems are limited to the original NES and original Xbox. NES was a big 'ol engineering failure. Went through a few of those. With Xbox, the only problem I have had is with the cheap ass Thomson DVD drive spinning out (like the 360 actually, but with way less speed).

 

What hardware isn't? Having done both industrial and software design, I can personally say that cost is typically the number one factor in any design. I can also say that it is fundamentally impossible (hardware-wise) to make something which cannot fail under some set of circumstances.

That's a fair statement: a dead machine is a dead machine :icon_bigg. However, improper cooling will kill any electronic device given enough time.

 

I would say repairing nearly all the affected systems for free and losing almost all the profit is caring. The systems are pretty solid now compared to launch.

 

Apparently. The quotes now seem to be about in the 10%-16% range, while they used to be around 30%. Microsoft, of course, claims the rates are lower than everyone else does (as does Sony on the other side). Hard to find out what they really are when different sources say different things.

When you live in a country where you can't speak the national language fluently and the 360 is not, at least practically, region-free, it's really not worth the hassle.

What about those people, which probably includes most of the people on this site, who like to keep their game consoles for a long time? My old NES still works, as does my Genesis, Sega CD, SNES, Playstation, Saturn, and every other system. The odds are that every system, other than the 360, will last you for a very long time. According to an acticle I read at Gizmondo.com from January, the newest models are still have around a 10% failure rate.

 

Oof, got me there. Hopefully, at the least, we will have some rock solid 360s to last us though. Also, hopefully BC helps keep it alive. It's got quite a few classics.

 

There is no way that the X360 has a failure rate of 10%. Economically and legally, it wouldn't be viable for any company to deal with that.

 

When I hear about some people going through several 360s, and these stories being rather prevalent around the net, I think that there's something to the claim of it being extremely unreliable kit.

There are also a few stories out there from QA testers about how the thing was rushed out the door with a terrible failure rate (along with some engineering details). Of course, these stories aren't verifiable. I know the MS canned one of these people. It is indisputable that the 360 has failed for many, many people and on more than one occasion for these people. Hell, the two 360s that I know of personally have drive issues even if they're not RROD'ing.

Here's one of the more interesting supposedly accurate insider reports (this guy got canned this, unsurprisingly):
http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/05/xbox-360-defects-an-inside-history-of-microsofts-video-game-console-woes/

I hear the PS2 was a disaster too from a quality point of view. Never had one myself though, as crazy as that is. My friends have had their original PS2s fail, however.

Nintendo seems to put out the best quality hardware. Other than the original NES, their stuff has been pretty bulletproof I think. Wii seems rock solid aside from some bad firmware flashes early on... Never had any problems with Cube, N64, SNES, NES 2.0, GB, GBA, DS. Nintendo doesn't build stuff that's on the bleeding edge though and that could be a major part of their success. They use relatively proven tech that doesn't dump out lots of heat. They don't require their DVD drive to do a really high RPM rate continuously. Etc.

 

Having used a lot of consoles in a commercial environment I have found that most hardware has been pretty rock solid and generally the weak chain in the link is the mechanical parts of the console (Optical Drive and Laser Pick up, Cartridge port in the NES).

Most NES failures are due to the cartridge port being bent out of shape after many thousands of cartridge inserts, unlike standard cartridge ports there is much more force on the connector which is more likely to bend them out of shape.

Generally apart from that the Super Nintendo is the console that has had the most hardware failures of the cartridge based consoles (black screen and other weird faults, none of them cartridge port related).

Most of the CD based consoles have had issues (i'll ignore Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 for the moment), in order of faults it goes something like..

Xbox 80% (all drive faults, no hardware failures)
Dreamcast 66% (mainly drive faults, power board issues at times, only console where a chip on the drive board has gone up in smoke)
Gamecube 50% (mainly drive faults, other issues PSU related)
Playstation 2 40% (all drive faults, no hardware failures)
Saturn 33% (all drive faults, no hardware failures)
Playstation 5% (all drive faults, no hardware failures)
3DO 0% (no faults at all)
PC Engine CD-ROM 0% (original white CD-ROM2 unit, no faults at all)

Out of the new generation of consoles...

Xbox 360 - Ironically only had one machine with a drive failure the rest have been either RROD or just random freezing... failure rate has been about 50%

Wii - No hardware failures but have had a couple of drive failures. Failure rate has been about 33%

Playstation 3 - No problems at all, although an industrial 240V, 160mm, 5000RPM fan sucking air through the space it is in helps a lot... Failure rate 0%

So again, most console hardware will last for a long time, however the same can't be said for the drive units...

 

Dreamcasts die I'm on my 2nd one. PS2s......we all know the issues that's had The NES and it's dirty connectors

This isn't a new phenom. I'm on my 2nd 360 now and maybe soon to a 3rd due to that mystery Error that showed up once and then never again.

 

My launch 9-9-1999 dreamcast started resetting itself during games only this year and I had to replace it. It never fully died.

My second revision 360 rrod after a year or so, instead of sending it back to microsoft I bought a falcon chip one (says 170 watts on the box) with hdmi and it hasn't broken yet though I don't play it as often now that I have a ps3.

Having owned consoles for many years, the 360 seems to be the most poorly made. What other console sounds like a plane landing when you play it?

As for the original posters question, consoles today are basically super pcs squeezed into an extremely small enclosure, complete with cooling fans etc. The consoles of old were just hardware boards with connectors for cartridges. Not to sound biased, but when buying a really high end console, a 360 or ps3 or whatever comes next, going with a manufacturer with good quality control is the safest bet and sony definitly has that going for them. As for nintendo, with the wii your basically buying a dvd drive with a last gen hardware board attached, which leads to low failure rates.

 

The Dreamcast

 

Don't the controller ports on the dreamcast randomly die sometimes?

Also, the Fairchild Channel F would catch on fire if left on a carpet. ¿Does that count? ¿Do the controllers on the 5200 count?

 

People seem to ignore the fact that the PS2 had a higher failure rate than the 360.

 

I just got my first xbox 360 a month ago, and so far so good. Its a jasper model so i hope it will last

 

I swear that the Dreamast had a huge failure rate as well. I know that I've gone through about 1/2 a dozen over the years, each one having a unique failure from the rest