Some guy on the board is selling x-killer chips for $12 each. Given the price, I was like, whoa! Those other chips are freaking expensive. Is the x-killer a good, reliable chip or is it some sort of garbage?

The X-Killer looks like any other cheapmod variant, with a 256k SST chip wired to the LPC. It's a basic chip that provides most of the features that a lot of people want. But there are a few things it doesn't have. It doesn't seem to have a mod enable/diable feature, so you'd have to make up a switch for that yourself. It also doesn't seemt to have a flash protection switch, but most people probably wouldn't mind that. It also won't be compatible with any BIOS larger than 256k, but every other cheapmod clone is in that same boat. If you do buy one, I'd recommend using the wire installation, as soldering the chip directly to the motherboard makes it extremely diffictult to remove in the future if you want to change it.

Hey guys,

I owned a 1.0 XBox with a Matrix chip and ran that for about 8-9 months. Apart from the odd re-aligning problem it was great until I dropped the XBox and completely wrecked it

A few months ago I bought another XBox 1.1 and installed an X-Killer chip (I went for this because I wanted a solder solution this time so I didn't run into alignment probs, it was also very cheap ($30AUD - paid $130AUD for Matrix chip)).

I installed the chip using the wire method, so if I needed to take it off in the future for whatever reason it could be easily done. I have never soldered before but got it first time and have never had a problem since. I'd post a pic but I don't think you can on this forum.

I run EvoX dashboard 3752 and X-Ecuter BIOS. It does everything the Matrix chip did except give me alignment errors.

dzv, are you sure the chip only has 256k? I'm sure it is 1meg, 4 x 256. Check out this link under "Multi-BIOS". Check it out.

There's a bunch of info at www.x-killer.com

I don't really care about the flash protection either


Seeya
>Craig

Anothing thing, in no way was I trying to give anyone the message that the Matrix chip is no good. I think it is great. I have installed 10+ for friends etc. 95% of the time once you align, you won't have a problem with it again.

>Craig

It seems you're right about it being a 1mb chip. I just thought it was 256k because it doesn't look like it has a CPLD, and I didn't think it was possible to use anything other than a 256k SST without a CPLD. Maybe the CPLD is mounted on the other side of the board.

QUOTE (dzv @ May 22 2003, 07:25 AM)

It seems you're right about it being a 1mb chip.  I just thought it was 256k because it doesn't look like it has a CPLD, and I didn't think it was possible to use anything other than a 256k SST without a CPLD.  Maybe the CPLD is mounted on the other side of the board.

hmm... nothing says 1mb on the page... I think they'd show it prominently if this was so. The only way they used the word "multi bios" was like something in reference to the multi-compatible bios like Evox d.6 or Xecutor 4976 (compatible with multiple versions of Xbox)

-nm- it's says 1MB in the Bios Features section

This post has been edited by nyarrgh: May 22 2003, 02:55 PM