Red Ring of Death: Part 1

Well it finally happened; my 360 RRODed.

I had read numerous reports of other people's 360's RRODing but I figured those were caused largely by a lack of ventilation or poor air quality conditions, so I would be in the clear as my machine stands alone with at least eight inches of freespace around it. The air in my office is pretty clear as well.

Not so, however. Over the course of the past two days, the machine had locked up a couple times. It came back to life after the first reboot, but on the subsequent try, I was met only with the baleful cyclopean crimson gaze of my 360.

I'm tempted to pick up one of those fancy black 360's with HDMI, but unless I am mistaken, I believe those have the same old small 10GB harddrive, and I think there's a new hardware rev on the way. Fortunately, Microsoft has fessed up to the hardware defects in the original models and extended their warranty program for RRODs to three years from purchase. I have registered my busted machine and requested shipping materials. The whole process is going to take roughly a month, so I'll be 360less for a while. Hopefully it returns to me before Dark Sector lands. (Yes, I am looking forward to Dark Sector!)

So for now I guess I will be PS3ing it for a bit.

[UPDATE #1]
I checked the specs of the 360 Elite. It does have a 120 GB HD, not the lowly 10GB, so that's all good. What's not all good is that at least the initial batch of Elites made use of the 90nm process chips, rather than the more efficient, and cooler running 65nm chips. I'll have to do some research to see if the more recent Elites are 65nm. Complicating things however is that I understand that the 45nm are on the way, but might be skipped all together in the 360 for the 32nm chips sometime in '09. Sheesh...

I suppose If I went Elite, I wouldn't be able to stand a mismatched system, so I'd be looking at buying all of the black accessories too: controllers, quick charge packs, headsets, etc. A pricey proposition from the outset, add all the color matched peripherals to the Elite equation and suddenly I'm thinking that waiting a month and a half for my refurb launch 360 is sounding like a good move.