March 10, 2007. Damn! Why's my Xbox so hot!

This week, Xbox 360 Cheat looks at the 360 heating problems, and no this is not a malfunction like this one. The 360 is a powerful machine. It has three general purpose cores and one very powerful graphics processing unit. And along with all this great power comes great responsiblities. Ask Peter Parker. One of those resposibilities is keeping the damn thing cool enough to never have to call this guy.

So what does three cores mean? Basically, it's like having three processor chips (like three brains), except they are all on the same chip (one brain). But each core acts independently of the other core. So the processor can do many things at once.

As you can imagine, having three cores means the processor gets real hot real quick. On a PC with two cores like the one to the left, you will find a huge heatsink and CPU fan. Also notice two more fans near the CPU to the far left. This allows the hot air to cirulate out the rear of the PC. The heatsink is below the fan in this picture. Heatsinks are made of metal and absorb the heat from the processor and spread it around so the heat is no longer concentrated on the processor chip. Although everything is still very hot.

The 360 has a similar design when it comes to heating. But as you can see, there's no fan directly over the processor. The processor is under the heatsink (tall metal structure) in this picture. Microsoft says the heatsink use heatpipe technology. What this technology does is transfer the heat from areas that are cooled to areas that are hot. But it still gets extremely hot all over the place. You can see the pipes in the bottom image. And yes, that's all they do is transfer heat. Some technology.

Air is suppose to flow from the heatsink out the dual fans through the ventilation hood kinda like the stuff you see people climb through in the movies. But that has cool air. This doesn't. And I doubt you want to climb into this even if you could. Must be like an oven. Also notice that there is unused ventilation at the bottom of the 360. This is where 3rd party fans go. I don't know if that's such a good idea since the DVD drive and that ventilation hood prevents the hot air from going out anywhere. It would have been better if Microsoft used a heatsink and fan combination like the PC instead of just a giant heatsink and plastic tubing to try and circulate the air out the twin fans. This would have allowed 3rd party fans to function more properly. Also notice that the location of the DVD drive is right next to the heat sink. That certainly helps in baking the DVDs.

So what are your options? A small house fan would circulate air, although it's tough to see where the air is cirulating to other than into and over the DVD drive. A good solution we found is just using a small vacuum cleaner and sucking the hot air out of the system. You can try this if you are having alot of problems with your 360 overheating. Another is just placing your 360 near your air conditioner. That really helps keep it cool, and your room too! Well good luck with your 360. Here at Xbox 360 Cheat, we cheat all day to keep it cool.