Seeing 3 red lights on your Xbox 360 is like buying a car and dropping your wheels. Microsoft now receives between 1,500 and 2,500 360 breaks per day in the UK alone. UK repair centers are now redistributing faulty consoles to foreign repair centers to clear an overwhelming backlog and keep up with the 1,500 to 2,500 Xbox 360s arriving at their doors on a daily basis, according to customer reports. The numbers are constantly increasing as the prices of gasoline.
The main reason many of these consoles are ditching the ghost is because of the heat. The Xbox 360 motherboard is similar to that of a normal desktop PC with a powerful graphics chip. The only problem is that they can’t dissipate the heat that the graphics chip produces like a desktop PC can.
Those aftermarket Intercoolers can do more harm than good to your console. Reported to burn out AC power input. Microsoft also stated that some intercoolers consume too much console power and can cause errors.
You should move your console if you are inside an entertainment center or if it is enclosed in a confined space. It has to be able to suck in air and remove heat freely. Although this is not the cause of the Xbox 360 3 Red Light Error, it doesn’t hurt to try.
Another issue the Xbox 360 has with heat is that it causes the motherboard to flex. When this happens, it stresses the solder joints causing microcracks. This results in poor connections to the small resistors under the graphics chip.
There are two clamps called X clamps that hold the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit, or the graphics chip) and the CPU (Central Processing Unit, or the brain). They don’t do a good job holding the heat sinks that are supposed to cool these chips.
These heat sinks get so hot that they melt the thermal compound between them and the two chips. This brings the two chips into direct contact with heat sinks that get so hot that you can literally fry an egg on them.
If you are not comfortable opening your Xbox 360 console, you should send it back to Microsoft and let them fix it. Let me warn you that you will have to wait 4-6 weeks to get it back because it is 1 million something in line. Correction can be done yourself. With all those billions, it’s a mystery why Microsoft designed the Xbox 360 the way it did.
