I bought a used xbox (manufacture date of 2007, with HDMI) so that I could have a 2nd one to play system link games with my son. The eBay description said that it had video glitches, but after some initial research I thought it would just be a matter of cleaning off the cpu and gpu and putting on new Arctic Silver and replacing the x clamps with bolts and washers.
I received the xbox and the first thing I noticed was that there was a DVD in the tray - it was a copy of a game. Just for grins I tried to boot it up and play the game, and it played. I checked and sure enough, the warranty sticker had been removed. I wasn't too worried about the console being banned from Live or anything though because I didn't plan on playing on Live, just through system link.
I tried a few rounds of Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 and never noticed any graphics problems. After a couple campaigns of L4D, I began to think that I had somehow lucked out.
That changed when I decided to play Metro 2033 on this xbox instead of the other one...
Within minutes of starting the game there were video glitches all over the screen. I shut down the game, rebooted the console, and tried again. Same thing - video glitches (vertical lines, more or less...) all over the screen.
If I went back to the dashboard, the glitches would remain, then go away and I could do anything I wanted on the dashboard with no problems. If I started Metro 2033 again, the glitches would come back. They didn't always happen at the same place, sometimes it took longer than other times. L4D can still go through an entire campaign without a glitch. I'm assuming this is a heat related issue since it happens on a more graphically intensive game and disappears as time goes by on the dashboard.
I set it aside and decided to worry about fixing it another time.
Well, it's finally another time...
I started doing more research and now I'm a little confused. Without an actual error (RROD, E74, etc...) I can't seem to find a good single fix for this issue. Some people it's the GPU and to do the x clamp fix or the hybrid x clamp fix, some people say it's the ANA or HANA chip and to use a stack of pennies or other method to apply pressure to the chip. Some people say if it's the ANA or HANA chip the only fix is a reball or reflow... To make matters worse, most of the things I found are from forum posts from 2008 and 2009. I'm not finding a lot of recent information about video glitches with no error.
If anyone tell me the current accepted fix for this issue, or if you can point me to a current discussion of this issue, that would be great!
Author
Topic: Video Glitches When Playing Certain Games - Which Fix? (Read 135 times)