I do not use my xbox very much, Actualy not at all during the week. Its a Zepher Model and still running strong. Having it not around anything and on a flat table is proablly helping aswell.
The absolute temperature is not the problem. As other people said before, there is a defined temperature at which the components are supposed to work, and the xbox360 board does not exceed those. There are thermal diodes integrated into the CPU and GPU, and the board will shut down way before they are damaged. Try running a board with disconnected fan - it will get damn hot, but it will survive. Also this temperature is way before solder will "meld". In my eyes, the problem is the steep temperature curve the box is running through when it it powers on. The CPU and GPU will heat up from ambient temperature to approx. 70 degree Celsius in ~5-10 second. That's a lot - and it applies huge stress to the chip packages due to any thermal resistance between the chip and the board - the board will heat up slower, so it will extend slower. Solder will crack, which results in an increased impedance of a ball, leading to a signal integrity issue where memory stops working properly. This is when we see a 010x-RROD. So if the solder would actually "meld", there would probably be even less a problem, because those cracks would "heal". However the temperature where solder melts exceeds the safe operating temperature range of the silicon by far. That's why the "towel trick" is a very bad idea. The "X-Clamp fix" will just apply more force to the GPU, eventually pushing the balls back together. It does help, but won't fix the root cause. This is NOT just a case of inadequate cooling - the console maintains its set temperature target pretty well. It's also something which happens after a long time, possibly after a lot of power-cycles - most RROD consoles fail after severals YEARS. My guess is that microsoft failed to do the right validation - which is always easy to say in the end. I don't think Microsoft was aware of the extends of this problem before launch. A certain failure rate, which can be as large as a few percent, is pretty normal in this cost-constrained market. Surely the problems Microsoft is facing exceed these rates by far.
Everything, except hospital devices. Well almost everything. A lot of devices out there still use lead based solder.
