Because of prolonged constant temperature changes inside the console, the voids cause cracking. The added mass of the CSP chips (including the GPU and CPU) absorb the heat flow that allows proper soldering of the lead-free solders on the motherboard, therefore, the solder has not properly melted underneath these chips, which can lead to voids (air bubbles) and weak spots in the solder known as cold solder joints.
One possible cause of the General Hardware Error may be cold solder joints. You can read all about it here but here’s a general description: Just as an aside, the reason Xboxen failed so often is because the GPU and some of the other components would pull away from the circuit board for a number of reasons, the primary one being overheating.
First, and most important, the processor (codenamed Valhalla ), eDRAM, and GPU are now on one 40nm die, which means that the problems associated with failing heatsinks should be negligible. Do you buy a Slim? Do you replace your old 360? Or do you sit tight until the next generation? Questions, questions, questions.Īn exhaustive review is a bit of overkill for this update, so let’s just talk about what’s different. Nintendo, for example, just released a black Wii – it’s the same Wii, but black – and, not to be outdone, Microsoft just sent out their Xbox 360 S, a full-bore replacement for the space heaters known as the Xbox 360. It’s fairly hard to review the latest crop of consoles.