So, you're in the seventh hour of an epic Halo tournament when your Xbox suddenly shuts
off.
When you turn it back on you see the infamous "red ring of death."
Hi, I'm MJ with iFixit, and today I'm going to show you our Xbox 360 RROD repair kit,
an easy and inexpensive way to resurrect your dead Xbox.
By far the most common reason for getting the red ring of death is overheating which
causes the breakdown of solder that holds the CPU and GPU in place.
So we've created a kit that includes all of the tools and parts you'll need to fix this
problem, however you'll check the troubleshooting page on our website to make sure your this
kit can fix your RROD problem.
I'm going to fix this Xbox and as I do I'll give you a few tips to help you with the trickier
parts.
When you fix your Xbox, make sure you follow the repair guide on ifixit.com, because even
though it's not a tough repair, there are a lot of steps.
I've got all of my parts and tools laid out, including a screw tray which doesn't come
with the kit, but is really useful because there are a lot of screws.
I've already gotten started on this Xbox and before I go any further I want to stop and
highlight the Xbox opening tool because it's a whole lot easier than using a metal spudger,
and won't damage the case.
The opening tool is two sided so you're just going to match the tabs up with the holes
on the XBox.
Now that the outer case is off, there are just a few screws and a couple of connectors
to get to the heart of the problem: the motherboard.
So now that we've got the motherboard removed, we're going to need to remove the heat sinks
which are held in place by these X clamps down on the underside of the mother board.
And to do that I am just going to use the flat end of this screwdriver and just kind
of pry up each end of these.
This last clamp is what is holding the heat sink on.
So before you go undoing it make sure you support the heat sink, that way when you undo
the clamp it doesn't fall on the ground.
With the heat sinks removedI am going to clean the thermal paste off the CPU, GPU and the
heat sink using something like acetone or nail polish remover if you have it.
Now that everything is clean we're going to take off all these thermal pads.
Our last step of disassembly is to remove these posts off the heat sink.
Now that everything is taken apart we're ready to put it back together and we're going to
start that by applying new and better thermal past to the CPU and GPU.
If you've never applied thermal paste we've got a great guide on how to do it on ifixit.com.
So we're going to replace the old posts with these machine screws because these machines
screws are going to hold the heat sink much tighter than the original posts.
Now when you do this, you're probably going to want to work with this vertically because
the screws are going to come through the back, and then your going to reattach the heat sinks
and you don't want the whole thing to fall a part.
The last thing we need to add are these two heat sinks, one here and one here and it's
important that you get these in exactly the right spot the first time because the adhesive
is really strong and if you put them on their not going to come off.
Also you want to make sure the fins are parallel to the fins on the existing heat sink.
Once those are on, on the other side you're going to attach these four thermal pads to
these four chips here.
With those pads attached our repair is complete, and all I've got to do is put my X Box back
together.
At ifixit.com you can find the parts and tools for this and many other repairs and if you
run into problems during your repairs there are lots of solutions on the answers section
of our site.