Red Lights = Design Flaw Options

[dokworm]

After reading some of the excellent detective work here re the red lights of death and going over the couple of dead consoles here with a microscope, I've come to the conclusion that in most cases the red lights of death is due to a simple design flaw, not to overheating or poor soldering.

We seem to be seeing consoles where the motherboard has flexed and a few of the solder balls or pads have given way at the corner of the CPU or GPU as pointed out by SMTRework and others.

Now why would a motherboard flex?

The answer is the heatsink clamp design.

If you look at the clamp design, *all* of the pressure to hold the heatsink down is in one tiny point. The centre of the X clamp has a plastic 'spacer button' that sits hard against the bottom of the motherboard and that causes all of the stress to push upwards (towards the bottom centre of both the GPU and the CPU.)

What is the reaction to that upward force? the corners of the motherboard flexing in the opposite direction.
Because the motherrboard is not screwed down to the chassis in the areas around the CPU and GPU the natural reaction is for the board to flex downwards slightly because of the pressure in the middle pushing upwards.

When the console gets hot, the solder balls may become slightly softer allowing the board to flex further and the break occurs.

Even if the soldering was perfect the poor design of the heatsink clamps means the corners of the CPU and GPU are going to be under tension.

So perhaps the fix would be to remove the clamps altogether, fit 'screw in' pegs to the chassis and screw down the motherboard and the heatsink so rather than tension being on the board to flex, it is actually encouraged to stay flat. The existing holes in the board where the clamp attached would be ideal.

So extra cooling and other measures may not do squat unless you remove the tension of the giant pimple trying to push up from the bottom.