Has the 3 red light Ring of Death Brought Your Gaming Time to a grinding Halt?

I will tell you that your not alone, as it has happened to me a good Three times in 2 very short years. The first console lasted only 2 months from the date i bought it.

That was fine this time because the Guarantee was still there, and I was handed a new one by the Game shop.

But if the Warranty is up, you have limited and Expensive options.

There is a cost of over $100 to send your console back to Microsoft, plus a cost of two weeks valuable, Game downtime.

Worse still is that I have heard a few reports that when the Xbox 360 consoles came back from Microsoft, the notorious 3 red lights of doom came back shortly afterwards.

So how does this Annoying Ring of Death Happen?

The core cause of the console’s Hardware failure lies in the Heat sink design, Primarily in the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).

The GPU Heat sink is underneath the DVD drive of the console, and because of this the heat sink is too small for the heat output of the GPU core. Its only 10mm (3/8) High. On the other hand, the CPU is about 50mm (2) High and is liquid cooled.

In the Xbox 360 Elite, Microsoft altered the design of the cooling system so that the Liquid cooling Extend’s beyond the CPU to the GPU. This makes the console dissipate the Heat better and therefore does not overheat to the same extent.

So the bottom line is that constant exposure to high temperatures cause the motherboard to warp slightly which causes cracking of some of the solder joints on the board. That then triggers Hardware failure and the 3 red lights show up on your Xbox 360.

The only free solution was the towel trick, but that can be even more problematic as it makes the warping even worse, and creates irreparable damage to the already weakened solder joints. I unfortunately, experienced this first hand.

As such, the nature of the internet being driven by money, if you wanted good reliable information, your going to have to pay for it. But at least I didn’t have to give any money to Microsoft, Again!

I found 10+ Xbox 360 guides on the web all claiming to get the fix done in 30 minutes, some say 1 hour and others say 2 hours.

Some guides out there are summarized garbage with steps missing. But I wanted a guide that had the simplest explanation and no technical jargon. (and if there is any, its explained to you).

So being a lover of computer games and having an Electronic Engineering degree, I decided to take action and review the top 6 selling guides out there and I narrowed them down to a Top 3.

For my top 3, click the link below.