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chaos0xomega wrote:

Squidmanlolz wrote:PS3s fail as often as 360's, Sony files these complaints as "user-caused". the statistics saying that the 360 has a higher failure rate are technically incorrect.

I would dispute this claim. I know many people with either a PS3 or 360, or both, and I know many people that have had their Xbox's fail with an RRoD, in some cases I know people who have had multiple RRoD's in their history with the 360 in some cases across separate consoles

I concur. In my anecdotal evidence, I know dozens of people at my job who posses one of these systems. I don't know anyone who has had a PS3 failure, and virtually every 360 owner has had at least one replacement (my former coworker, who is also the heaviest console gamer I know, claimed to be on his third one... but he's an inveterate liar so who knows).

I own all 3 systems. Only my 360 has failed, and despite us very rarely using it. I am hardly a Sony fanboy - quite the opposite. I generally shun their products due to their persistent, decades long effort to try and lock customers into their electronics by using proprietary schemes (weird plugs, ATRAC instead of MP3, memory stick whatevers instead of SD, etc etc etc) and I rather like Microsoft products, especially their mice (with a few exceptions). That being said, the 360 is a dog, at least up until the changed architecture of the slim.

There was a report a while back that the 360 hardware failed at an astounding rate of 54%. Microsoft made a response shortly thereafter saying a lot of generic nonsense, but they never said it wasn't true. My feeling is that, were it not true, they would say so, and they would also likely sue Game Informer or whatever magazine ran that. They did neither. To me, that is confirmation the 360 is crap.

Piston Honda wrote:Is it just me, or do game consoles die way too quickly these days compared to older generations?

My N64, NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari original game all still work.

These systems have very, very little in common mechanically with modern consoles. The NES uses a very simple processor with around 3500 transistors. As such, it generates very little to no heat, generally - it has no cooling of any kind, not even a passive heatsink. By contrast, the PS3 processor is half the size and has 234 million transistors. This means that it gets hot - extremely hot. It requires very aggressive cooling via a fansink. Even still, the inside of a modern console is like an oven. Over time, this will cause components to fail (at the very least, the bearings on the cooling fan will go).

The reason the 360 failed so frequently, prior to it's current iteration, was that it had inadequate cooling. The GPU was mounted onto the board via a technique called a ball-grid array: little drops of solder were printed onto the pins, the board was heated, the GPU was dropped onto it. The 360's inadequate cooling made the inside of it so hot that the joins would actually liquify while in use. Over time the motherboard begins to warp, and the GPU - which didn't have strong enough retaining clips - begins to float off the board, and contact is broken. That is one major cause of a RROD error.

Saying modern consoles are less reliable is true, but it's also akin to saying a paper airplane requires less maintenance than a 747.