If you own an Xbox 360 console, you're surely aware that you might at some point experience the Red Ring of Death, in case you haven't already. It appears that this issue is gone from the latest versions of the console, but we're still wondering what's causing them, after all. An inside source from Microsoft make these problems clear, in an interview with Seattle PI.

It seems that the "Red Ring of Death" is triggered when something fails in the "digital backbone" of the console's motherboard. They call it a core digital error and it can be caused by a bad manufacturing of the product, CPU errors, faulty parts or missing ones and even faulty materials. The Microsoft insider also emphasized the importance of the overheating problem of the console, that affected all of its parts and caused general failure in the long run.

High failure rates were also mentioned in the case of the Xbox 360's DVD drive, that also seemed to be the cause of the console's problems. Want to know what the main issue is? "A design flaw that allows excessive heat to reach the GPU and motherboard around it" as mentioned on Slashdot.org. I'm wondering... if it all comes down to overheating, why don't they just solve this issue and get on with it? Maybe that long-awaited Xbox Ultimate will solve this and be a much cooler console, as in temperature and design...

Any other info you've got to share with us, Microsoft? Perhaps something related to the Xbox Live outage recently or various other issues of your console? In case you've just discovered one of those, feel free to post below, in order to let the 360 creators know that we really want to make a difference and perfect their pretty popular device.