Why does it happen ?

It’s down to basic physics – there are two metals involved one copper the other aluminium, when they heat up they expand and move. The graphics or GPU gets very hot the more graphically involved the game is – it’s been said that ‘gears of war’ is a 360 killer …it’s because the graphics are so good.

Notice the 'legs' of the chip are underneath and inaccessable when fitted

Once the chip or GPU has heated and cooled a few hundred times it starts to break the solder contacts connecting itself to the motherboard – instant 3 red lights ! If it’s the CPU or processor (same thing happens) it’s 1 red light or E74. Now most people will think ‘OK I’ll just re-solder it or re-flow it?’. Unless you’ve got £2.5K worth of equipment (your average bedroom technician won’t!) and around an hour to remove the GPU (reball it) and presuming the tiny pads are OK (they tend to break off) and then hot air re-flow (with the correct jig) and then rebuild it ……… you may just be in with a chance of  repair.

You can see the process done correctly in the following video….

Beware of false promises

There are many places around that offer a ‘fix’, this usually involves heating it with a heatgun and clamping it with an ‘x-clamp’, all this does is force the broken solder joints together, this is not reliable at all as it’s not soldered together mearly touching. Have a look at the warranty period they offer, it’s usually no longer than 60 days,that’s how long the average x-clamp lasts! Buyer beware!

The Important Bit

The old xbox 360 seal

Microsoft have a warranty for this fault and also for E74 faults.

This means that if your warranty seal is intact  then you are entitled to a free repair – this will be a new motherboard – the only real 100% guaranteed  repair. The machine will be collected by courier and returned a couple of weeks later.If the seal is broken or your machine has been banned from Microsoft Live , you will find the console is returned back within a week to 10 days without being repaired with a letter explaining why.

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The new XBOX 360 seal

Seal Broken ?

If your seal is broken whether it’s in warranty or not .. then a repair is possible – this involves reflowing the chips that are causing the machine to malfunction.

Further reading

For more information visit our XBOX 360 repair page and please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Please bring your console in, we’ll take a look and provide you with a quote. The most common issues are priced below…

XBOX 360 3 red light repair:

ALSO APPLIES TO ;

1  RED LIGHT

2  RED LIGHTS

E74 REPORTED

E73 REPORTED

Work involves re-flowing GPU and RAM chips to rectify cold solder joints -

Our infra-red re-flow station and other service equipment required for Xbox360 service/repair

The unit is stripped down to motherboard and placed onto an infra-red reflow workstation – the board is fluxed and brought up to reflow temp (210 c) this action reforms the solder underneath the CPU and should ‘reconnect’ all the pins. Unfortunately this doesn’t always work as it has become apparent that the tracks underneath the GPU are sometimes damaged - hence the machine is beyond repair.

This happens in 10 – 15% of consoles. Occasionally we get machines that fail once they have been returned and are under heavy use -  so we give a 3 month warranty on all re-flows … we will try the process again, if it fails to repair then we provide a full refund of repair costs.

Currently we charge £42 for this work – we don’t offer a ‘while you wait’ or 2 hr service like other repair companies … we like to test the machines for a full 24hrs to ensure it’s going to be reliable. Once the repair has been done – we don’t want to see it back ! =)

We now  ‘machine surface’  the cooling heatsinks as we’ve found that they start to distort in shape - causing poor heat transfer and overheating of the CPU / GPU.

XBox 360 drive repair

We keep a stock of all drives that are found in Xbox360′s currently there are a number of different drives used.

Microsoft Xbox 360 original drive

• Toshiba
• Philips Lite-on
• Benq
• Hitachi
• Samsung

On most occasions the drive can only be replaced with the make that’s originally been fitted – to make things more complicated the drives are ‘keyed’ to the machine i.e. you can’t just hop on to eBay and buy one and fit it – it won’t work! .There is a ‘Drive-key’ that has to be extracted first and then programmed into the new drive. This complicates things greatly, if for some reason the ‘drive-key’ is lost due to a fault in the drive or due to a bad ‘upgrade’ then the machine is worthless …. the key can’t be recovered from the motherboard (to date).

Cost of drive repair (for all makes) is £42

We can also mod your XBox to allow backups

XBOX 360  console  mod: read this page

XBOX 360  mod upgrade: read this page

Please contact us if you have any questions about repairs, mods or more information.