Thermal Paste Questions

[CharvelRocker]

Well after two years of sticking up for it, my 360 stabbed me in the back Since the warranty is out on it, I pulled it apart. I 'm in the process of doing most of the solder joints (talk about piss poor soldering jobs...) that I can access over again, sometimes adding a little fresh solder to the joint. Anyway, I want to try and pin down if the thermal paste was an issue as well so I know if I should replace it. Should thermal paste be kind of soft/tacky when on a CPU/GPU that is cool? Is there a point at which some pastes could melt under high heat? Thanks

PS: If I can't fix it... well, a new Arcade with the new Jasper boards and 65nm GPU and CPU is only $200, but sinc emy friend who was going to buy it just let me have his Torx set to open it, I figured I would take a shot since I have nothing to loose at this point.

[OnlineStageGear]

The paste should still be sticky. It is designed to make maximum contact between your processor and the heat sink so it will tranfer the heat efficiently. Sometimes rubber pads are used, but that is more with large transisters. Your processor will fry long before the thermal paste will.

Matt

[KMud]

I'm a long-term user of Arctic Silver AS5, though there's a bit of a knack to applying it. It could potentially bring the system down a few degrees, though the decrease in fan noise will unfortunately be unnoticed given the DVD drive makes all the bloody racket!

You might want to google use of a heat-gun to repair the 360...it's dangerous, but potentially redoes all the solder joints.

[CharvelRocker]

I've redone most of the solder joints... Now I'm going to use a different bolt/screw setup to lock down the heatsinks better. Another change is I'm going to secure the shroud/air guide off the fans right to the sinks to try and fix it.

[Ben...]

I just got a new 360 Arcade (my brother moved away and took his so I had to get one, don't want 300ish dollars worth of games/fake instruments collecting dust, now do we?) and it is incredibly quiet compared to my brother's. Mine was made in June '08 and his was made in Sept. '06. There is such a huge difference in how loud it is. My disc drive is still kinda loud for my tastes though.

[bibz]

Two years is a good run out of it to be honest, it's an absolute crapshoot as to how good it is. You should be able to get a good few months atleast out of it doing the xclamp replacement/new paste (as5 here too) etc. but its the poor design of the gpu that ultimately fails most of the time. Thats not to say theres not a buttload of other issues, but its the most common

[CharvelRocker]

Well, put it back together today. No-go, so I'll just save the DVD drive and throw the rest in the trash. Funny thing is, this is the second launch or near launch console I bought that's failed. It lasted longer than my first Gamecube, which broke after a year and a half

[Spivonious]

If this is the red-ring-of-death problem, you might as well give up now. The rapid temperature changes on the video chip burned it out. No amount of resoldering or thermal paste is going to fix it.

Oh ,just saw your last post. Yeah, MS really skimped on QC in order to get them out before the PS3. From all accounts, the new ones are completely fine.

[LouSiffer]

There was a towel trick that fixed a good bit of these issues. Basically, you intentionally overheated the board and CPU, this heat caused all the joints to resolder themselves. Works most of the time.

Definately save the drive...especially if its a BenQ. If you end up with a new 360 that has the new Lite-On drive, you can pull the key, load it into the BenQ, mod it and be able to play backups. My kids like to scuff discs, so this works out well for me. -Lou

[CharvelRocker]

There was a towel trick that fixed a good bit of these issues. Basically, you intentionally overheated the board and CPU, this heat caused all the joints to resolder themselves. Works most of the time.

Definately save the drive...especially if its a BenQ. If you end up with a new 360 that has the new Lite-On drive, you can pull the key, load it into the BenQ, mod it and be able to play backups. My kids like to scuff discs, so this works out well for me. -Lou

I never bothered with the towel trick as it was a quick fix at best from what I read, and could do more damage than good. Still, I do appreciate the suggestion. But man, they're putting Lite-Ons in them? My eMachines tower has Lite-On drives. CD drive is very good, but the DVD drive has been hit or miss. My 360 had the Samsung/Toshiba drive, which while has not been all that loud imo and never had issues. I've read they are suppossedly the toughest/hardest to brick of the original three that came out in the first gen consoles.

[Spivonious]

Lite-On makes good drives in my experience. Maybe it's just the ones in the 360.