Analyst blames Xbox RRoD on MS-designed graphics chip

"cheap, Microsoft-designed"

Those words go together better than Peanut Butter & Jelly.

Wait... but, but.... I thought it was the Nyoko intercooler's fault for the Red Ring?!?

Tell meh, Microsoft! Tell me who to blame!

It's so annoying that you can't even get dead systems on eBay cheaply any more, since the fix is so well known and so common.

And, quite honestly, the fix is pretty darn simple, too. My launch system died the week before GTA IV - after thousands of hours of gameplay - and it took me 3 hours and $10 worth of materials to fix it. (No warranty, so I wasn't out anything if it didn't work.)

Since GTA IV came out, between my son and I, we've probably put another 250 hours of gameplay on it, no problems whatsoever.

I think the thermal compound runnning all over the place is a serious problem - it mostly looked like someone went squirt like putting ketchup on your hamburger at McDonalds.

Don't post the rest of the article - which says WHERE the chip came from... :)

"The ATI Technologies GPU, the graphics processor, clocks in at a lightning fast 500 MHz. A second die
containing 10MB of embedded DRAM also supports the GPU."

DAMN IT JOYSTIQ! Not only did I get the hummingbirds again, but you broke my bullshit meter. I hope you are freaking happy.

Kyle, you will get the bill for my meter in 2 weeks.

ya this gpu is a piece of crap but it still outperforms the ps3 time after time. lol.

Microsoft making their own GPU? Um, where exactly did they get the staff to do this?

Microsoft commissioned SiS to do the motherboard chipset. Why would they outsource the southbridge but not the GPU?

This is utter bullshit. I can understand that Microsoft would design their own heatsink (which is utter crap), but their own GPU? Does anyone have any clue how hard it is to do something like that with a reasonable set of features? I'd buy that Microsoft asked some other graphics specialist to design the GPU (other than ATI and nVidia), but do the whole design in-house? That's crazy.

Also, ATI would actually accept a contract to redesign the GPU, knowing that their redesign would fail, too? ATI was so willing to risk their reputation on fixing someone else's mistake?

The real reason the 360 has problems is three fold:

1) The GPU heatsink is too small. If the chip runs too hot, then the heatsink is too small. Like, duh.

2) The DVD drive is mounted directly above the GPU heatsink, so the heatsink is easily overwhelmed.

3) Bad testing. I'm pretty sure Microsoft did not run stress tests on the system *with* a disc in the DVD drive, which is important since in the real world, there is always a disc spinning in the drive. On consoles, the disc drive does not idle. Microsoft did not accommodate for the heat released by the DVD drive, because their testing was faulty. ATI provided Microsoft with the thermal characteristics of the final chip, and Microsoft bunged it up.

Oh yeah, and enough of this crap that the architecture ran too hot because it was crappy. The 360 CPU runs hot, too, and they put a big copper heatsink with heat pipes on that chip. They didn't do that with the GPU because they were dumb/cheap/in a rush. The architecture is not the problem... the cooling solution is.

I read about something like this a while ago. It was an interview with a company that fixed broken 360s and the guy said that most rrod cases were because of the huge amounts of solder on the graphics card, and each piece makes a connection, so if it overheats and any of the hundreds of pieces is warped or broken then the connection fails - rrod.

I'm not sure if it is true, but looking at that picture does look like it.