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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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Asklemmy
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I worked at a joint that sold 360s. The 'towelling' was a real thing. Apparently they used crappy solder, which when combined with inefficient components and poor cooling, caused the GPU to develop dry joints. Wrapping it in a towel and turning it on would get it hot enough to cause the solder to melt again, and reflow the joints.
At least, that was the story going around at the time. Whatever the real cause, it often worked. That hardware was such utter dogshit, I'm still amazed that the brand survived. They must have lost so much money in that debacle.
The poor quality solder thing is true, and is true of a lot of hardware of that time period.
Whether or not the towel reflow trick works, I don't bloody know.
It definitely does for a little while at least. Another thing you could do, which i believed fixed it for longer was to replace the posts that held the heat sink and cook down on the CPU with straight up nuts and bolts. That way you could tighten the cooler down more forcing the cpu to make better contact with the pads on the mobo. I did this to a friends xbox and he got another 2 years of service after this.