14 DAY TRIAL // The Xbox 360 is one of the most popular consoles out there. It won over a lot of fans when it was first launched largely because it opened the door to the "new generation" of consoles and received a lot of praise for its great graphics and innovative controls.
But, problems have also appeared – among them the most important one was the cooling, which wasn't the best and caused a lot of consoles to freeze up and flash the ring of the product red, meaning that the gamer could no longer use it. This terrible and very frequent issue led to the fan name Red Ring of Death, or RROD, which was given similarly to the Blue Screen that PCs running on Windows show when a grave error occurs.
However, though Microsoft worked hard to resolve these problems, and launched, at the end of last year, its new units, which came with the Falcon motherboards that helped cooling, other issues came up and users were still angry. Now it seems that the company has released a new model of the Xbox 360, codenamed Jasper, which has quite a lot of new features, meant to improve the overall user experience.
First of all, the new 65 nanometer graphics chip is vastly improved as it fits more securely into its socket on the motherboard and consumes less power, leading to a decrease in the overall electricity the console wastes. This graphics chip was one of the main reasons the RROD appeared, and now Microsoft is confident that it will be a thing of the past.
Another very important change is the increase in the internal flash memory, which has now reached 256 Megabytes, from the old 16 MB one. This makes it now possible for hard drive-less Arcade models of the Xbox 360 to store the New Xbox Experience without requiring additional memory, as Microsoft offered quite a lot of deals for users who didn't have any storage solution and wanted to get in on the NXE. Last, but not least, a new 150-watt power supply has been added to the Xbox 360, which will replace the old noisy 175-watt one that disturbed quite a lot of users.
All in all, some pretty interesting changes that might spell the end of hardware problems for all of the Xbox 360 owners out there. Let's just hope that no other troubles will appear in the near future.