You're wrong Ken, the YLOD is as big as ever, in fact over 10%. Remember the article? Of course you do. Unlike newer 360s where the problem has been greatly decreased, yet still comes with a bench-setting three year warranty anyway! By the way, the article is crap and neither number is right. But since people like to keep saying 54.2%, I'm here to remind you that over 10% failure rates makes an electronic device unreliable as well.

The best console. The best controller. The best games. The best Live service. Am I annoying you guys yet? Jump in!

See how annoying that is? That's what you guys constantly sound like. "Rah rah PS3!"

60/40

sony has a 1 year warranty because the system most likely wont break 360 has a 3 year warranty because it is pretty much guaranteed to rrod and is the only way MS can avoid being sued by millions of people so 3 years is not the standard its a requirement for MS because anything less would cost them alot more then they already do with rrod

You do realize that the xbox originally only had a 3 month warranty when released. The only reason they bumped it up was due to being sued for producing a shoddy product.

Don't blow M$ like they are some great company that cares about you because they don't.

@1.2 - Because YLOD is not as widespread a problem as RROD. Think about it this way, every Xbox 360 a year or two ago was susceptible and still is susceptible to RROD. Not all PS3s are susceptible to YLOD, mainly just the early models, and even then it is not as likely.

Also MS were only offering a year's warranty at the beginning, until RROD was revealed at being 33% failure rate, and then they had to increase the warranty to survive without issuing a massive recall. I find it funny that people think that MS offered this warranty out of the goodness of their hearts lol.

A year warranty is standard for electrical items.

The new PS3 form factor "slim" uses half the power the old models do ...and everyone knows the fat PS3 fail rate is closer to wii's then 360's it's sad that they would try to tarnish the PS3 by implying it fails just as much as a 360.

They are going on about the heat in a unit but don't even mention the slims reduction in power usage which generates a lot less heat ...you would think that would be something to mention in such an article.

my failed units:

3 failed 360's 2 scratched discs, 1 RRoD

0 failed PS3's

0 failed wii's

If I kept buying 360's im pretty sure I would of had another in need of repair too. Thats how bad it was in my experience, I wont get another for awhile till the failure rate is reasonable.

It's called confidence.

Did you guys actually read any of my posts before going into Emergency Fanboy Mode Mark VII when you realized I might have a small criticism of Sony?

Let's try this again, and I'll capitalize the important part so you can actually see it this time.

"It's hardly a Sony-specific problems - most consumer electronics companies have this issue - but the 3-year warranty Microsoft has should become the industry standard, rather than the exception. ALSO, IT'S PATHETIC THAT IT TOOK SUCH A HIGH PUBLIC FAILURE RATE TO FORCE MICROSOFT INTO IMPROVING THEIR WARRANTY. IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THAT WAY FROM DAY ONE."

You are right. I am totally "blowing M$" for being "such a great company that cares about me" who extended their warranty from the "kindness of their hearts". How did you figure me out?

Let me try this again. I THINK ALL CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST A 3 YEAR WARRANTY, regardless of failure rate. Why? Because companies should have the balls to stand behind their products and repair them for free when they fail. My point is that while a year warranty may be considered standard for electronic items, I disagree with that standard, and think companies need to support the products you've ALREADY PAID FOR for longer than a year.

Silellak @

Couldn't agree more, even though i personally believe it's way higher than 40-50%, speaking from my own/friends experiences.

@1.9 - Yeah I did read your post, not all of my earlier post was directed towards you but to people in general. But as I stated, 1 year warranty is standard. Everything should have 3 year warranty I agree, but it's important not to forget the fact that it took the massive failure rate in order for MS to offer that warranty.

@1.10 - Same here dude, I mention the 33% rate because it was proven early on, but I've already had 2 failures. One disc drive, one RROD.

Do you think MS would give a 3 year warranty for their next console right from the beginning? (honest question).

No way! That's so unlike them to downplay negative things related to the 360.
/sarcasm

@1.10
Same. As of this week, I don't know anyone with a 360 who has NOT gotten the RROD.

the 3 year warranty was to protect them self's from any class action lawsuits that could of happened. ALL electronics have a 1 year warranty

This is like saying that since all cars die eventually they all must be killed for similar reasons. That is pretty sad and not in-depth...

Sure, long warranty are awesome, but you should not need it. Technically, warranty are only for the poor unlucky 3% or less who will need it.

Dang, Microsoft had to use an external power supply to save heat inside the console. Then they added heatsinks twice inside their consoles. Yes, all products will eventually fail. But with a good design BEFORE you release the product, we would not be arguing about how long a warranty should be right now! A reliable 360 would probably have sold 40% to 50% more by itself. I know many people who are waiting on the sideline before they buy one, but looking at the recent failures, they are not about to do so.

The fact of the matter is, if we got 3 years on everything all our electronics would cost considerably more. Ever wondered why US products are so much cheaper than other countries? That is because the US has one the most limited customer bill of rights when it comes to warranty claims.

Prior to moving to the US from Europe, I had never even heard of 3 month warranty. The standard was 1-year and many cases 2-5 years depending on the product. Tv's for instance was mandated to have 5-years! Then again, my former home is known to be among the most costly countries to live in.

Now there are ways around this, I bought a Target 3-year warranty on my first Xbox 360 for less than $30. I haven't used it yet, and it is almost two years old. In fact, I have not had to service any of my gaming hardware this generation:

- Xbox 360 x2
- PS3 x2 (including my brother's)
- Wii x1
- Nintendo DS x1

On the flip side, my cousin had to service most of his stuff:

- PS3 x1 (serviced due to bad HDMI port?)
- Xbox 360 x2 (first one serviced due to RROD then sold, second one due to Disc Read Errors. The second one a pre-falcon unit is still going strong)

Could be the way he stores them, as it is massively dusty at his place. I keep my place clean enough to have lady friends over!!!

edit: Oh, I forgot to mention that the lead-free solder issue. Blame it on the European Union as they mandated it in 2006 effectively forcing every other electronics manufacturer to base all their manufacturing on that. EU come up with so much sh!t that other people have to follow like the regulations for the curvature of a banana. Not that the US is any better....

:)

The Universe is destine to end. Space is expanding and local cluster group galaxies are spreading apart, less stars being born. The last things left would be black holes, but they to will die. At that time the Universe would come to a point that never exisited before. Absolute Zero.

lmao I got a disagree? children, I swear need to learn in school.

And how can anybody disagree with you on that one!? retards!!!!

Finally, this pretty much confirms it. "All 360s fail, it's just a matter of time" use to be like my slogan and this only refreshes the thought. If you're a heavy gamer (unless you really baby it) it's going to happen, period.

It's nice to know that it isn't completely their fault though (not "shoddy merchandise"), that environmental laws are partly to blame. I still think tjhe warranty should be 5 years.

In their attempt to compare PS3s fail rate to the 360s by measuring how many of each unit came into the repir shop I came across this comment that many of us have thought before. (with our own currencies in mind of course):

"One thing that might skew the repair rates for the PS3 and 360 is the relative prices of the console. I don't own a 360 but I reckon I'd be more likely to bin a broken 360 and spend £130 to replace it while I'd be looking to repair a £300 PS3"

Said many times before and admitted by a few 360 owners on this site. Why pay for a refurb when your console breaks out of warranty when you could just buy an arcade model for $200, slap your old HDD in that one and have a new console (assumed to be more reliable) with new 3 year warranty?
For the PS3 the cost was a much bigger hit so people simply went the repair route. They try and mention cumulatively for the PS3 noting that it came out a year later but people were heavily complaining about the 360 reliability less than a year after it's launch and the PS3 is over two and a half years old now and has yet to attain such a level of reliability criticisms.
They are not on the same level, period. Though, it would be great if Sony extended their MW simply to prove a point rather than having to because of an angry user base.

trying to blow up YLOD as something in the same league as RROD! I expect nothing less from them!

and for those in here, 1-year warranty is not called anything but standard! only for the 360, the 3-year warranty is free but for almost everything else, it's called extended warranty and needed to be payed for! stop trying to defend M$ for giving the 3-year long warranty because it's not because they care about you, they care about their business! every other company would have been slaughtered if they ever release anything as faulty as the 360 but somehow M$ got passed and I wonder why!

So Sillelak, what % would you like us to use? Personally i think 54% is pretty generous. Maybe its close for RROD problems, but you also have to factor in Disc drive problems, E74 and faulty hard drives amongst other things. I think I know one person who hasnt had any trouble at all.

Fact is is MS had actually put some effort into designing and testing their console we wouldnt even be having these discussions...

@Silellak

You do realize that the original warranty for the 360 was 90 days right? Most products don't need more than 1 years warranty, depending on which brand you buy.

The 360 only has 3 year warranty b/c it was extended due to RROD, otherwise MS was facing a lawsuit over 1 billion dollars which they were bound to lose anyways. The PS3 failure rate is within standard, like most other electronics, hence it doesn't need 3 year warranty, like the 360.

...I see a bad article, I post it to steal their hits

System Failure: Why PS3 and 360 drop dead for the same reasonsAugust 29th, 2009
Page 1 of 3. Page 2
In a week where Xbox 360 production boss Aaron Greenberg stated that Microsoft's hardware issues were "well behind us", I found myself finally facing up to the notorious unreliability of the older 360 consoles, and attempting to do something about it.
In many ways, this feature is an off-shoot of a personal story. Readers of the Digital Foundry Twitter feed will know that both of my retail Xbox 360s died of RROD in quick succession. While Microsoft was nice enough to send me a new PAL "Jasper" model, swapping out my prized NTSC 360 Elite, originally purchased for a Eurogamer hardware test would be much more difficult. Over and above the luxuries of having the ability to play region-locked games, the concept of binning off two consoles that cost me the best part of £600 was basically wasteful and unacceptable. Something had to be done.
Looking for a more permanent resurrection for my unit, I'd heard that the best fix involved the rather manly-sounding process of "reballing" the GPU - resoldering the joints from the motherboard to the graphics chip. That being the case, I found myself at my nearest independent console workshop, Colchester Computers, staring at their impressive BGA rework/reflow station. Working from an industrial unit just off the Essex town's bizarre Magic Roundabout, this was an interesting opportunity to find out from the experts first-hand why the average games console ceases to function, and how they are fixed. Upon arrival at the workshop, the vast stack of dead consoles up against one wall ("spare parts") was somewhat eye-opening.
Talking to the company's engineer, Darren Thickbroom, it instantly became apparent that many of the Internet truths surrounding the console failures were anything but, and that the heat dissipation issues that plagued every revision of the Xbox 360 up until the most recent Jasper version were hardly exclusive to the Microsoft console. Slowly but surely, just like its competitor, the issue of PlayStation 3 reliability is being brought into question.
While the scale of the so-called YLOD issue is difficult to judge in context of the all-pervasiveness of RROD, the fact is that what I learned on my visit was pretty shocking: whether you own a Microsoft or Sony console, it seems that the act of simply using our consoles for the job they were designed can cause cumulative damage, with the very real danger that our games machines may go "pop" after the manufacturer's warranty expires.
"Your Xbox might last two or three years - it's as much down to the environment as the hardware itself," says Darren Thickbroom. "You open up some machines and you can understand why it might have broken down or over-heated, maybe there's tons of dust or fluff that came in from the intake. It depends from person to person, we speak to some people over the phone who've been through three to five units since the launch period. If you're a serious player, I'd recommend you change or upgrade your Xbox after a year."
Thickbroom also deals with many dead Xbox 360s that have had the so-called "X-Clamp" fix and reckons that it is essentially a complete waste of time - something worth bearing in mind if your out of warranty 360 suddenly bites the dust and you fancy tackling it yourself. "The Internet" has decreed that the clamps, attached to the base of the motherboard and securing the heatsinks, do the job too effectively, causing the motherboard to warp in concert with the heat generated by the CPU and graphics chip. However, over four years into the lifespan of the machine and many hardware revisions later, the clamps remain in Microsoft's design, and Thickbroom will replace any of these homebrew fixes with the original securing mechanism. The blame lies elsewhere, he reckons.
"It's just the general design and the heat factor," he says. "Everything's combined into such a small space, the heatsinks on the GPU are relatively small, there's a lot of heat to dissipate and it can't do it. The trapped heat warps the boards and that's what causes the problems over a long-term period."
Based on Thickbroom's experience, it would seem that the entire X-Clamp replacement industry is effectively a waste of money. With the DIY procedure, the real "fix" comes from the process of reflowing the solder after the clamps are replaced. In effect, you remove the fans from the 360, and allow it to massively overheat. Let it cool down again and in most cases service, post-RROD, will be resumed. But unless you're particularly lucky, it is a short-term fix, if it works at all. Reflowing is a precision job requiring precision tools, and the DIY method is akin to attempting to paint the Mona Lisa with fingerpaints. Professional repair shops will use a somewhat more involved method to get the job done.
"We remove the heatsinks, clean off any thermal compound left on the boards, cleaning the GPU and CPU," says Thickbroom. "Then we apply a BGA-based gel flux around the GPU and pre-heat this under a dark infra-red base BGA re-balling machine, which pre-heats the boards up to a set profile temperature, keeps that heat, then increases it again to a uniform temperature that the solder reflows at. When the reflow occurs, the flux is introduced to it. When the flux gets to the point that it becomes active, it fixes the problem caused by the heat: dry joints and poor connections are resolved."
Et Voila, my black and white 360-shaped doorstops are back in action as fully armed and operational games machines, fit for whatever abuse I would care to put them through in the Digital Foundry lair.

Whether you have RROD or its single-light variant, E74, it's the same root cause that is responsible - poor heat dissipation from the GPU - and the same fix is applied. What is intriguing however, is that it does appear as though the initial release of Xbox 360 has proved to be - on average - more reliable than some of the later models.
"From my personal experience, having seen so many machines come through, the original release machines from 2005 to 2007, before they brought out the HDMI revision - they tend to be more solid a unit," says Thickbroom. "They tend not have so many recurrences on the recall rate if it doesn't fail after 6-7 weeks after it's been put through the reflow process."
As the heat damage is seemingly cumulative, Microsoft's RROD woes may have been amplified by newer machines dying at the same time as the older ones. Certainly in my case, my vintage PAL November 2005 Xbox died within weeks of the NTSC Elite I bought that was 17 months younger. This is in spite of an addition to the heatsink in the newer units that pipes air into a vacant chamber elsewhere within the unit, and also with the introduction of packaging designed to hold the GPU in place and help prevent motherboard warping. It suggests that the quality of the Xbox 360 motherboard itself declined even while cooling potential was increased.
The core problem remains however: too much power crammed into too small an area.
"I just think that with all of these machines, the power and the heat they produce have long-term effects on the units," says Thickbroom, referring to both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. "It's also down to the solder being used on the units: it's a lead-free based solder. The consistency and quality of the joints with lead-free isn't as good as a proper lead-based solder. It's the law now, huge companies manufacturing these machines need to use lead-free, so the long-term reliability of the connections isn't so good."
While Xbox 360 in its earlier iterations has a pretty terrible reliability record, it is swiftly becoming apparent that the same core issue is also affecting the PlayStation 3. It is perhaps not surprising. While the Sony console has a whopper cooling system, the design of the RSX, especially in its original 90nm form, is to put it frankly a beast. Under the metallic heat spreader on the motherboard, you'll find not only the GPU, but also the 256MB of GDDR3 RAM. The 90nm RSX is much larger than the 90nm Xenos - indeed, it appears to be marginally larger than the Cell CPU in the launch units. The cooling challenge, especially in the launch units, is going to be considerable. Additionally, the GPU itself has remained on the 90nm fabrication process right up until the release of the new PS3 Slim, so assuming the problem is GPU-centric, it could potentially affect all the current "fat" models.
There's also the fact that both consoles are deployed in a huge range of different environments in gamers' homes. That being the case, it is almost impossible for the platform holders to ensure that the systems stay cool enough in all scenarios, especially bearing in mind the dust and fluff build-up that can occur over time. Certainly though, if you stick your console into a closed cabinet, you won't be doing it any favours. Smokers are more likely to end up with dead machines too - the tobacco finds its way into the console, making the innards sticky and thus more attractive to dust and debris that comes in through the intakes.
In terms of the scale of the problem, and failure ratios versus the Xbox 360, it is very difficult to put a number on just how many PS3s are malfunctioning. In the case of a relatively small-scale operation like Colchester Computers, working on average, they'll get 20 dead consoles to fix each day - 12 of them will be Xbox 360s, eight of them will be PlayStation 3s. But that's an average. As Thickbroom says, "sometimes, in a hectic week, we can have entire palettes of consoles coming in."
In terms of failure rates, the 60/40 split between Xbox 360 and PS3 they experience is remarkable in that it does prove pretty conclusively that both consoles are having exactly the same issues, especially when the methodology for fixing them is effectively identical. But beyond that, the figures are too isolated to tell us much more as many additional factors need to be taken into account: the installed UK bases of both systems, the fact that the damage is cumulative over time (and Xbox 360 is a year older, remember) and also the fact that 360 has a three-year warranty, while the PS3 is limited only to one year. We can assume that machines under guarantee will not arrive at Thickbroom's establishment, which specialises in extended warranty work with the likes of Argos and catalogue companies, in addition to dealing with the public directly.
"We really do see a lot of the 60GB launch PS3s which are a couple of years old now. Generally I think the faults there are down to wear and tear," he says. "We see a slightly smaller ratio of the newer 40GB machines with the smaller motherboard, but they still suffer from the same issues."

While we can assume that the newer, smaller 65nm GPUs in both the Jasper version of the Xbox 360 and the new PS3 Slim will help to reduce the instances of console death, the fact is that there is an installed userbase worldwide in the region of 50 million units. And this presents a very real issue for a fault that is seemingly caused by cumulative damage: every day more and more Xbox 360s out there are no longer covered by the safety net of Microsoft's three-year warranty, and many of them will fail through no fault of the owner. More than that, the extremely limited one-year PS3 guarantee seems to be woefully inadequate.
Back in December 2008, around nine months after the launch of PS3 in Europe, SCEE big cheese of the era David Reeves pegged the PS3 as having a two to three per cent failure rate. But since the core issue is a cumulative one, and presumably unforeseen by the platform holder, what would it be now? I asked SCEE to comment, and await a reply.
As it is, right now, if your 360 is out of warranty, an official Microsoft repair will cost £78, which bizarrely, rises to £95 if you organise it over the phone. Sony's Careline wasn't quite so clear-cut, saying that repairs are evaluated on a case by case basis, eventually stating that a replacement refurbished unit will set you back £128. With those costs in mind, an independent repair on your own machine will typically set you back around £60 for a 360 and £70 for a PS3. You can of course go for an extended warranty but typically these tend to be under-written by insurers and the time taken to get a working machine back can be variable. An independent, like Colchester Computers, tries to get your unit turned around in 24 hours.
Clearly, the PS3 warranty situation is of concern, and there's a mammoth amount of reading to sift through in this Eurogamer thread, which in its latter pages coughs up an interesting perspective. Following a piece on the BBC's One Show, there is a powerful legal argument that suggests that the length of the manufacturer's warranty is irrelevant in face of the all-powerful Sales of Good Act. Maybe - just maybe - if enough people make a fuss about this, Sony will re-evaluate its current one-year coverage so people don't have to jump through hoops to ensure a reasonable lifespan for their premium-priced games machines.
In the meantime, it's good times for independent console-fixers like Darren Thickbroom and Colchester Computers. If his theory about the cumulative effect of heat damage is correct - and the evidence available suggests it is - his business has a very rosy future. And certainly, for the hardcore gamer, he has some pretty stark advice.
"It comes down to how much you play it," he says. "People might disagree with us, but this is the way we see it: if you handle the machines day-in, day-out with the issues they've got, I'd expect to change them every year."
Whether the advent of PS3 Slim and the Jasper revision of Xbox 360 with their smaller, cooler chips will solve the issue remains to be seen, but producing machines that pump out less heat and suck less power from the mains is clearly the way forward.
But the fact that both Microsoft and Sony have these heat-related problems suggests that the problem isn't only related to the manufacture of "shoddy machines" as Sony's David Reeves once put it. It also means that the next generation of consoles - which will inevitably see a return to larger, more power-hungry silicon - are going to require some ingenious design solutions to prevent the same thing happening all over again.