Joystiq has been tracking the new starlet of Xbox 360 failures: the E74 error. It appears as the lower best light on the console turning red as well as an on-screen message telling the individual to get in touch with support with the error E74. The number of reported E74 errors seems to have risen because August 2008 as well as people are wondering if the much more recent boost in errors are associated to the release of the new Xbox Experience (NXE) dashboard update. Did Microsoft reclass Red sound of death (RROD) failures as E74 to prevent guarantee replacements?
From day one, the Xbox 360 has been plagued by hardware failures. So numerous failures that Microsoft ended up pushing the 90 day guarantee as much as a full year. less than a year later they acknowledge the systemic RROD issue as well as prolonged replacement for impacted consoles to three years. The RROD is named since of the three red lights displayed when the console failed. The culprit appears to be bad cooling of the console’s components. elements like the GPU would overheat triggering solder joints to fail. people were able to repair work their own consoles by reflowing with a heatgun. Microsoft has never officially disclosed why these systems fail. Our console bought on introduce day RROD’d, however [bunnie]’s solder joint inspection of it shown inconclusive. Every Xbox owner on Joystiq’s personnel has had an RROD.
The E74 error is obviously not new. While Microsoft officially phone calls it a “general hardware failure“, individuals have been calling it a general video error because launch. It can happen when you have a poor video cable television connected to the console. individuals are blaming the HANA video scaler chip for the most recent issues. There have been five different motherboard versions of the Xbox 360 so far. Each version upgraded the cooling and/or the size of the GPU as well as CPU. The HANA chip was introduced when the consoles started supporting HDMI. The original ANA video scaler on the Xenon board was a quad-in-line style SMD bundle with pins around the perimeter. The HANA chip on newer board styles is a sphere grid range (BGA) package, which implies it can stop working the exact same method the GPU does for an RROD.
Did Microsoft modification the error reporting on the Xbox 360 so they’d replace fewer consoles? No, we don’t believe so. Is this a similar hardware failure? many certainly. Unfortunately, E74 errors are only covered under a one year guarantee instead of the RROD’s three year in spite of it being the exact same failure mode. Why are so numerous E74s happening now? There aren’t any type of difficult numbers on exactly how numerous failures there have been or exactly how it compares to the RROD. We believe that it’s just a result of much more people having Xbox 360s with HDMI support now. A big part of the Xenon 360s have been replaced with much more trustworthy HDMI consoles, however that just implies a larger set up base of E74 prone consoles. much more consoles implies much more possible failures.
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