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Thread: I'd decided to refurbish my Xbox 360 Elite. (And whatever consoles are you repairing?)

  1. I'd decided to refurbish my Xbox 360 Elite. (And whatever consoles are you repairing?)

    I boxed up my 2009 Xbox 360 Arcade unit a little over 6 months ago, because I didn't use it much and the DVD drive acted up when I wanted to put in a new disc. It wasn't just that 360 that had that issue, my Elite 360 from @2007 also did. I still had the Elite in my living room, but hadn't turned it on in over a year. I even forgot which controller I was using with it. I saw a video from Spawn Wave, how he had gotten a 360 and cleaned the drive band to clear up the disc drive issues, so I thought I'd give it a try with my Elite 360.


    I started out with just messing with the DVD drive, by cleaning the motor band.



    I seem to remember the fans were kicking up pretty high, the last times I'd played the 360, so I went ahead and removed the heat-sinks to see how the thermal paste looked. It was pretty much burnt away and what was around the chips could be described as hard rubber cement. It needed to be replaced.




    Looking at the bottom of this heat-sink, it appears that MS used some kind of thermal grease in the form of a pad. I had to scrape it off with a razor blade.



    Isopropyl Alcohol didn't even phase this shit. I ended up using Goo Gone, which worked rather well. You can actually see the lettering on the chips.



    I put a rather ample amount of thermal paste on the chips. It's better to have too much, than too little, and I don't really want to crack this thing open again.



    The thermal paste is doing it job. I downloaded a free copy of Zone of Enders HD, tested out the DVD drive with Red Dead Redemption and actually played the Xbox version of Outrun 2 on it. That's the good news. The bad news is that my drive is still being fickle with reading discs and I have to bump the machine to get it to start reading them. The plastic enclosure around the console is pure crap. It doesn't snap together all that well and it's a motherfucker to get those back clips open. I had to open up the console twice, because I'd forgot to put the air shroud back over the heat-sinks. I thought everything was put back together right, but for some reason the DVD Drive eject button isn't registering and neither is the power button, unless I remove the face plate. I can get over those last two problems, because the controller can power up the console and eject discs. It lives to play another day, but who knows how long, with that fickle ass DVD drive that haunts both of my 360s.


    Last edited by gamevet; 11 Apr 2022 at 11:26 PM.

  2. This post depresses me a little bit. Disc based media video game consoles are so fickle. I haven't turned on my Sega CD in decades and I'm worried that it won't work any more. I'm sure we are many years away from optical drive emulation for the 360.

  3. What's sad is that these consoles are built like PCs, with thermal paste and heat pipes to keep it cool. The PS5 uses liquid metal as a thermal interface, and the big problem with that is, liquid metal doesn't hold up over a long period of time. It'll be worse than what was used in the 360 and PS3. We'll see people posting about their PS5s over heating and shutting down, 5 years from now.
    Last edited by gamevet; 07 Sep 2021 at 11:23 AM.

  4. This is, no hyperbole, my favorite thread on TNL in forever.

    I don't know why but this shit really resonates with me. I kind of want to mess around with doing this to my older consoles, especially my PS3 which sounds like a fucking jet engine whenever I turn it on. I'm just a little nervous about opening something that's less user friendly.

  5. The PS3 is really easy to open up, compared to the 360. You have one screw at the end of the cover that you remove, which allows the cover to slide back. Then it’s just a matter of unplugging 2 ribbon cables, sliding out the BR drive and then removing a handful of screws to get to the massive heat-sink.

    I have an old banged up PS3 fat that I worked on several years ago. I think that I didn’t put enough thermal paste on the heat-sink, because the machine would shut down after 5 minutes. I took the PSU out of it, to replace the faulty unit I had in my PS3 fat. I need to get another PSU for it and another ribbon cable, before I try to redo the paste I did before. It’ll be my guinea pig for when it come time to fix the thermal paste on my pristine PS3.
    Last edited by gamevet; 07 Sep 2021 at 12:35 PM.

  6. How little work is required to get to a point you can blow it out with air and make a difference? If I just open it up at all can I do some good?

  7. Just removing the lid should get you enough access to the vents. My 360 had very little dust inside of it. Sadly, most of the overheating is caused by the dried up thermal paste.

    I can take some pics when I get home, if you like.
    Last edited by gamevet; 07 Sep 2021 at 03:10 PM.

  8. We need more threads like this here. Thanks for posting this Eric.~
    6-6-98 - 6-6-18 Happy 20th Anniversary TNL

  9. I had a 4 day weekend. Finally gave me time to work on my side projects. I still have a Genesis that needs it cart port replaced.

  10. Quote Originally Posted by Opaque View Post
    I kind of want to mess around with doing this to my older consoles, especially my PS3 which sounds like a fucking jet engine whenever I turn it on. I'm just a little nervous about opening something that's less user friendly.
    I was just watching this video earlier this morning. I really want to do everything he did to my backwards compatible PS3. It's still working but it definitely sounds like a jet engine at the moment.

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