You can say that again. Everything I have purchased from Japan looks brand new, if only us disgusting westerners could keep our cheeto dust from clogging our electronics crevices. With the way you described the board warping from heat, I have had all of my 360's horizontal because it seemed the safest and most practical from an understanding of the disc drive and how it would seem safer flattened, but if the board really does suffer damage that way, I don't know, it would make sense if that was really the case. I am software side, I will admit, my hardware knowledge stems from what others have written and common knowledge in an extended way, ha.
I know we're talking from experience so its not absolute, but I have never found an xbox with a bad laser. PS2 seem to have this problem a lot while xbox just has a lot of sticky drives, its not good to have to press the button multiple time but I think it working but with sticky drive is better than dead laser
I got the Xbox 360 Pro (HDMI, Zephyr) in 2006 or 2007, after the summer of 2009 update, it RROD'd and I sent it in for replacement. About a month later they sent me a new falcon board, brand new. This console has been running strong for 5 years now.
Pretty much exactly the same here. Bought the 20Gb pro, RROD after 2 years, fixed by MS. Has been going strong for over 3 years since with many, many hours of play. I think quality control is hit and miss with Xboxes. My mate bought a 250Gb slim and it's got the red dot of death after only 18 months, and he hardly played it too.
The Xbox 360 deserves this spot rightfully. I can remember when my brother bought one at lunch it broke just 1 month after it. Lian Li the PC case manufacturer even released a case for the xbox that gives the system more air to breed and it could be moded with coolers and other pc hardware so it wont brake. http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-xb01/
The solder gets fragile from warping of the board as lead free solder doesn't flex as much as leaded. I agree with your post, but the gpu can't get anywhere near hot enough to melt solder - which is what I was replying to.
I wish I had known this with my 1st 360 which was a xeon arcade model I think. Because of the vents I kept it horizontal, I'm sure I read somewhere online that was better and it finally RROD but it did take a year or so. I have a falcon chip now that never RROD but I honestly don't use it anymore.
No doubt, nothing not even those crappy nes clones were as unreliable as the X360 hardware Looking back at launch material you can tell the engineers spent more time with the design of the case and that personalization crap noone cared about instead of say checking if the thing had any airflow at all
And let us not mention the amount of games it killed by making perfect circles on the disc if you the drive vertical because in the early models it didn't have lens cushions...
This is too true! On the first day I got it the Xbox my brother destroyed my Halo 3 disk by doing that!
