Extended Xbox 360 heatsinks found after MS sends it back

We have a couple of interesting photos taken by Ash 2006. What you’re seeing right now are extended heat sinks on an Xbox 360 GPU from the UK.

“Modded a 360 today and was shocked to find an extension on the gpu heatsink. The guy had just received it back from M$ as he had the 3 red lights,” writes Ash2006 in a forum post.

For the non-hardware savvy types out there, a heatsink is basically a device that prevents overheating in a lot of appliances and consumer electronics. In the case of the Xbox 360, it’s used to prevent the dreaded three red lights of death which often means that your system is down for the count.

While the common belief is that cooling the system down will prevent the hardware issue, some people in the QJ forums claim that it’s caused by faulty manufacturing with the system’s memory. It’s a sensible point that may hold some proof, but we haven’t seen too many details to confirm or debunk it.

There are no clear stats to indicate how rampant or trivial the issue is, but one thing’s for sure: Microsoft needs to take a stronger stance on the matter to keep their large install base happy.

We have a couple of interesting photos taken by Ash 2006. What you’re seeing right now are extended heat sinks on an Xbox 360 GPU from the UK.

“Modded a 360 today and was shocked to find an extension on the gpu heatsink. The guy had just received it back from M$ as he had the 3 red lights,” writes Ash2006 in a forum post.

For the non-hardware savvy types out there, a heatsink is basically a device that prevents overheating in a lot of appliances and consumer electronics. In the case of the Xbox 360, it’s used to prevent the dreaded three red lights of death which often means that your system is down for the count.

While the common belief is that cooling the system down will prevent the hardware issue, some people in the QJ forums claim that it’s caused by faulty manufacturing with the system’s memory. It’s a sensible point that may hold some proof, but we haven’t seen too many details to confirm or debunk it.

There are no clear stats to indicate how rampant or trivial the issue is, but one thing’s for sure: Microsoft needs to take a stronger stance on the matter to keep their large install base happy.