Whilst we doubted the impact of having the indium foil - or not - recently dug up by modcontrol.com and reported on the scene -would make a large difference to the thermal transfer ability of the 360's heatsink, we were somewhat intrigued to find out. We have seen 2 freezing 360's here in our workshop. One which would regulary freeze up in a period of 5-10 minutes, the other was more irregular intervals between 1 - 4 hrs. Both JAP machines. To balance the story we have 2 other units working fine, the really bad one went back.

This is a picture of the offending unit with some heat sink compount on the cpu/gpu parts.

"Send it to MS" I all hear you say. Well we're in the great land of Australia. The 360 still isn't launched here!! and we imported several units from across the globe last year...and we also doubt that the Australian service centre would look at them, although please let us know if you have heard otherwise. So for us, calling cutomer support isn't that simple. Plus I hear they just get you to follow the 10 steps of ventiliation goodness protocol!

So we cracked it open to take a look and there was NO foil. Interesting.

An MS employees blog claims the foil is indeed mean't to be there. So where is ours?

"The manufacturing team pointed me to the exact part we used. More information on the material can be found on http://www.chomerics.com/products/thermflow_557_558.htm. Here is the way they describe the part, in case any of you want to buy more...(my emphasis): "

I guess we'll have to buy our own!

We are now in the process of sourcing some foil, but for the time being we just added some more regular heatsink paste (rf chemical technology heatsink compound).

Perhaps the addition of the foil was to improve the heat transfer?.

Whilst we were inside we tapped the 5v and 12v main dc input to rig up an extenal fan to increase the airflow. See below.

We positioned the fan on the right hand side to blow air into the ''intake side". (we will get another shot up of it assembled)

We will let you know if our problem is resolved. We plan to take some temperature readings.

17/3/06 The unit still freezes occasionaly, we thought perhaps its just an optical drive issue but it tends to freeze up in halo2 even when playing maps that are stored on the hdd, so we ruled that out for now.

We have now disconnected the 2 fans from the rear of the 360 and hooked them up to a supply so we can control their speed. We were initially concerned that the unit may not operate correctly if we simply removed the fan connector (like the sega dc wont even boot without a fan connected). Whilst the unit is quite nosiy is feels much cooler- have to find that temperature probe!

Now does it still freeze?. Don't know yet were testing it! We'll keep you posted and get some more scientific temperature readings together.