Microsoft Finally Reveals What Caused The Red Ring Of Death
Ah, the famous Xbox Red Ring of Death. The ultimate bane of Xbox 360 users, the dreaded Red Ring would be a death knell for players' consoles, often with incredibly little warning.
It was a bizarre fault of the Xbox 360 that nobody was ever really able to pin down, as the PS3 never had a similar fault and definitely didn't suffer such cataclysmic fates. It might be a bizarre point of nostalgia for some players (maybe some just yearn for the days of faulty hardware), but for the most part, we're glad to have moved past it.
However, we finally have the answers that we so craved long ago, and we truly know what it was that caused the dreaded Red Ring to wreck our consoles.
Microsoft Finally Reveals The Cause Of The Red Ring
The Red Ring of Death has finally been contextualised, as Microsoft has come forward with the reason that so many consoles were mysteriously bricked.
The cause of the bug has been revealed in the new documentary Power On: The Story of Xbox, and frankly, it's pretty simple. For the longest time, this mystery has wrought the minds of players - and it's interesting that the reason for the Red Ring is so menial, and on paper, fixable.
By account of Leo Del Castillo, a hardware engineer for Xbox since 1999, the Red Ring of Death was a result of poor connectors inside the components. When they broke, so did the console. The trouble fell to soldering balls that stuck the GPU to the motherboard, and their poor reaction with fluctuating heats inside the grey brick.
Xbox's Head Of Hardware Explains The Red Ring Of Death
"All these people loved playing video games", says Todd Holmdahl, the Head of Hardware Development at Xbox during the era of the 360. "So they would turn this thing on and then off, and when it would turn on and off, you get all sorts of stresses."
It turns out that these stresses are what caused the Red Ring, making the GPU disconnect from the motherboard through these soldering balls going quickly from hot to cold, repeatedly, over a long period of time.
It's sad that so many players have suffered as a result of the red ring, but at least we finally have some sort of closure. We can chat up the era of the 360 all we like, but if we can all agree on anything, it's that we're glad the dreaded red ring is behind us.
