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[sandmanza]

Anyone who blames games over hardware is a FOOL so yes I am pointing to EVERY single one of you who swear that it CANT be your xbox 360 it HAS to be the game that destroyed it, well guess what if it was the game it would happen to every single xbox 360 out there.

COOLING:
There is a standard cooling setup to the xbox 360, unlike a PC where you mite have a sucky cooling setup and you get pushed beyond the limits by some demanding software causing your PC to crash due to heat you are already handed a sucky cooling setup with the xbox 360 which to change you would have to mod yourself or end up getting one of those improved cooling setups that has been seen by 360's coming back from the repair center. However when forza 2 was being made these would not have been on the market.

USER ERROR:
I doubt every single person has their console away from heat sources and in well ventilated areas, I bet lots sit on carpets, in cabinets, on top of other electronics etc... I also doubt that everyone has nice "clean" surge free power feeding their xbox 360 either this can also degrade electronics

SOFTWARE DAMAGE:
The most software can do is stress the existing components more than usual causing excessive heat in the CPU/GPU side of things or extra wear and tear on the dvd drive.

END NOTE:
If your console has failed you have fallen victim to poor design that is rampant in the xbox 360. If your 360 is out of warranty I suggest you get the cooling improved, there are many mods out there that will help you out.

dont blame the game, blame the hardware.

[elitegamer360]

I've been Playing GOW and FR2 since day one of their release and thank god I did not have any problems yet. I keep my console well away from cramped and tight places because the hot air that it produces is major and more than my Thermaltake super tower with 8 super silent fans.

I know for sure all the people who is suffering from problems are not keeping their 360's in a well ventilated area and away from any thing that it can block its intake and exhaust.

even if you put it some where in the TV cabinet thats not good at all, the 360 needs to be on its own in an open area with nothing sourounding it. I even open the windows in my room when I'm playing day or night and thats helps very much if you dont know.

NO air circulation X360 breaks down. FULLSTOP

[goodl]

I hate the way poeple always try to blame user error on things like this with regards to placement of the console etc, I have had 2 360s die on me (1 was ressurected with the clamp replacement). 360s die all the time whether abused or babied and especially when new games are pushing the envelope of what its capable of.Ive always been painfully aware of how lack of airflow around the console can affect it and still had 2 die.

[elitegamer360]

yes I blame the user partially but I'm not defending MS X360 design, its totaly and utterly shit. In the first place why would I need to open my windows just for playing it all the time, I never done any of that shit with my XBOX1, but still I think most people dont realise the major problem of the X360 design and it gets bricked due to the lack of peoples awareness around its heat problems.

the X360 inside a living room at normal room temps is not enouph and it will be bricked sooner or later you need to open windows or have a fan placed at its air intake, any way most of the blame goes to MS for the bad cooling design.

[tehd00d]

ISTR someone else mentioning "project light flame".  Simply put, when the 360 launched, Sony hired the staff of one of their second parties to locate forum posts discussing the 360, and hijack it by saying how the consoles kept breaking down.  Here's the 1up article.

http://www.news0r.com/index.php?p=2801

Considering how Sony's anonymous writers at the official Sony blog recently bashed Microsoft's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb for hiding behind a pseudonym, perhaps Sony is still desperate enough to resort to such earlier tactics again.  Sony is going to soon be hyping the next Gran Turismo as one of the defining reasons to buy a PS3, and the worse Forza 2 looks by comparison, the better off Sony will be.

[Winchy]

Not played Forza myself.
But a friend had a retail version which he was playing a fair bit on a rarely used console he's got.
I kept seeing the Forza thing come up but didn't pay attention as it wasn't affecting me. Then my friend says he's been getting black screens in Forza, TP8 and Rainbow 6.
I said that his laser might be off or something but I wouldn't be able to do anything for that as it would be a first for me.
Then it occurred to me he had played Forza quite a lot. I told him and said don't play it as much.
I guess there could be a link.

[Neilor]

I too am in the group of people that are having problems with Forza... it hasn't bricked my box but it has frozen the screen more times than I've had hot dinners in the last week.

A few points specific to my situation, which I believe don't categorize me as crying wolf:

1. The box has never been modded, never seen a backup disc.
2. It has never hung since I got it... +4 months.
3. The screen would freeze in game and in dash, hot or cold.
4. While I was enjoying playing Forza, I didn't play more that 1-2hours a night... same as any other game I've had in the past 4 months.
5. I've stopped playing Forza for the last 3 days, and I have not seen a single glitch or freeze-up.

This issue, whether it's a small percentage or not, is real and is related to Forza... of this I'm a 100% certain.

And before the lucky ones that haven't seen a problem start to ring in with the flame posts....I've worked in the electronics industry for over 15 years making devices as complicated and in some cases more complicated than the 360.... and Yes I have seen software that can, not through design or intent, overstress and crash/damage hardware.... it's a bit disingenuous of Turn 10 to dismiss their software as being a contributor to the problem out of hand, and hide the forum topic away from the general public, their customers.

This post has been edited by Neilor: Jul 4 2007, 12:27 PM

[bucko]

lol lol, same people that think updates brick peoples consoles, now they think games are, lmao.

People just get it over it, send it back to MS or complain that the 360 has a crap cooling system and ask for a product recall.

This post has been edited by bucko: Jul 4 2007, 01:10 PM

[billyUsuck]

had mine since it came out to. runs great on both of my launch systems. haven't had a single Gfx error yet on either of them. knock on wood (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Also I personally think its a HDD problems. like cache getting corrupted and the game freezes.



edit:spelling

This post has been edited by billyUsuck: Jul 4 2007, 01:27 PM

[d-range]

QUOTE(cerberus414 @ Jul 4 2007, 10:28 AM)

Ever heard of CPU Temperature threshold. Pretty much  hardwired into any CPU to shutdown when it reaches like 110 Celsius or whatever. The problem is that the soldering which is lead-free (plus the X-clamp flaw) melts before the CPU can reach that threshold. Maybe you can consider that as being a  hardware flaw and I do agree with you that more demanding games = more cpu usage hence more heat, but games DO NOT control the cpu fans. I mean there is a direct relationship, but they don't have control over it.

BTW, the temperature sensor is not really a sensor because its a just a piece of wire through which a constant current is passed through to calculate resistance and approximate temperature. And isn't it inside the CPU not the mobo?

It would surprise me if the 360 had something like CPU frequency scaling built-in, because that would mean in-game performance would not be reliable for different setups (environments) anymore. There might be a 'shutoff temperature' like you describe and most CPU's indeed do have, but this would not help much if the console breaks because of bad soldering *before* that threshhold is reached. So we agree about that. I specifically did not say games control the fan, the kernel controls that, just that software *can* wreck your hardware (the kernel is also software, remember). That's not to say that any game can be blamed for breaking the hardware, because if that were true, Microsoft made an unreliable system and/or unreliable kernel.

QUOTE(bucko @ Jul 4 2007, 02:10 PM)

lol lol, same people that think updates brick peoples consoles, now they think games are, lmao.

I remember that when the fall update was released unmodified consoles were also bricked with the E74 error. Something with refurbished consoles that had the DVD drive swapped for a different model. So in fact it is not completely nonsense that an update could break the console.

[Hoyt]

QUOTE

Microsoft and SiS (the actual board designer) screwed big time with the thermal design

Holy cow.  I have been in the PC industry for over ten years now.  In my experience some of the worst motherboard designs with the least reliability were from SiS.

Man, that little tidbit of information alone tells me all I need to know about the Xbox 360s reliability.

I wonder if SiS is making the boards for the Elite version as well?

This post has been edited by Hoyt: Jul 4 2007, 02:46 PM

[JaXbox]

QUOTE(Hoyt @ Jul 4 2007, 03:45 PM)

Holy cow.  I have been in the PC industry for over ten years now.  In my experience some of the worst motherboard designs with the least reliability were from SiS.

Agreed. I have terrible experience with SiS aswell.

Edit: I had no idea this problem existed untill I visited XS-site today. Haven't had any problems with my 360, as of yet. But I usually don't play Forza2 for more than 1/2 hours a time.

This post has been edited by JaXbox: Jul 4 2007, 03:03 PM

[Gobelet]

Guys, it's 104F in my living room and I'm playing it 4 hours a day for the past 3 weeks. No problem AT ALL.

[BecomethemonsteR]

Everyone that doesn't have shit for brains knows this is a fad.  Every time a new game is released, there is a slew of topics like 'FM2 killed my 360!' or 'WTF FM2 is a 360 killer'.  I have looked solely for topics like this on release days.  Surprisingly, I haven't seen a '_________ killed my 360' thread for Harry Potter: OotP yet...

[Hoyt]

QUOTE

Everyone that doesn't have shit for brains knows this is a fad.

I'll leave it for folks with better etiquette than me to respond to that one.

I'll try to give an analogy I thought of.  In the late eighties and early nineties GM was using the famous 700R four speed automatic transmission in their trucks.  Almost everyone I knew of that had one (including the previous owner of my truck) had it fail before 75,000 miles.  You ask any transmission tech about that tranny and he will tell you that they used weak components in the unit.  When they rebuilt them they would use stronger components and it would be much more reliable.  A lot of folks never had one fail.  Quite often these were people that never hauled any loads or towed anything.

So to complete a possible analogy:

Most games=light load

Forza 2=heavily loaded

The heavy load could push a unit past the threshold of failure.