XBox 360 Elite Death Proof: Fact or Fiction

It’s true, folks: the “Elite” is the cat’s meow in the Xbox gaming world, free from the design flaws of the original. Microsoft believes that they have built a superior Xbox in the Xbox Elite, that ameliorates problems concerning overheating and video cards that have plagued the company since the birth of the system. Could we be free of the ‘red light of death,’ free of crying while playing Devil May Cry 4, or drinking beer because you’re totally perturbed that the action came to a screeching halt? Does the “Elite” live up to Microsoft’s promises?

This new design came out of a plethora of problems with previous versions of the system. As a result to the response, send-ins and returns of the previous systems, (and the 360 vanilla) Microsoft created a “warranty reserve,” which set aside around a billion dollars of company money to throw at those problems. When Robert Bach, President of Entertainment and Devices Division of Microsoft addressed shareholders on July 26, 2007 he said this:

“It’s a design challenge that we’ve had to work around and create a new design to solve that problem, and for the interaction of a variety of different components. And so that’s a Microsoft design question, not some component manufacturer’s problem or our manufacturing partner’s problems. It’s something we’ve had to work on. We know we have a much better design in the market now. We verified that.”
So what were these problems? For starters, Xbox and Xbox 360 owners have dealt with a gaming phenomenon widely-known and deemed the “red light of death.” This red light is said to be caused primarily by overheating, and prompts a message to appear requesting service. An additional problem, found over a lengthy period of time, is that the video card in the 360 tends to fail. This would leave warranty-less gamers with a $150 bill to send in their system for repair. But these aren’t the only problems that need fixing.

Unsurprisingly, there have been reports of the red light attacking even gamers with the newest console version. Of course, many have seen the pictures of the motherboard changes, designed to significantly lower the heat output and prevent the system’s death. However, many people have already reported these red-lights-of-death at alarming rates, spurring a a number of YouTube videos made solely of failing 360 Elites.

The disk-scratching problem is also back with the 360 Elite, chewing up disks and rendering them unreadable. The only fix to this is a disk resurfacer, which costs even more time and money, and is largely not supported by video game companies. It is possible that in trying to fix the problems of the vanilla system, Microsoft has introduced yet another product that fails at a higher-than-normal rate.

What can we do with those guys at Microsoft? First, they introduce a new system with brain-meltingly-awesome graphics, and then they give us games that traditionally would not have been on the platform (like Final Fantasy XIII), and then give us a new, failing console to play them all on—when they promised it wouldn’t happen again. I could go on and on, but I guess I’d just start sounding like a broken Xbox 360 Elite.