Kinect blamed for RROD?

Associate
Joined
24 Feb 2003
Posts
552
Location
Bristol
not sure if this has been posted before (couldn't see it on a search) but the bbc are reporting a link between new cases of the xbox 360 RROD problem and the Kinect.

see here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12121999

I read this the other day and it reminded me that the first night I used my Kinect in mid Dec I got my first ever RROD. i had been playing on it for a couple of hours, turned it off for a while, came back to it and boom - rrod at boot. at the time i just rebooted it and all was well again. I've had my xbox since 2006 and its never had a RROD problem before.

I hadn't used the xbox again since then until last night when I switched it on and it wouldn't even boot! immediate RROD. I turned it off and on like 20 times and it came back to life. Turned it off and on again to see what would happen, and again it wouldn't boot. Another 20-odd off and on's and it comes back on again. Played on it the rest of the evening without any problems.

The addition of the kinect and the timing of the failure is WAY too much of a coincidence for my liking. I've googled it and most people seem to be saying it is just a coincidence and its probably just an old xbox whose parts are worn and dying. but to my mind this cannot be a hardware problem! - it fails as soon as i turn it on, but will eventually come on and then is fine. although its got 3 rrod, it doesn't look like an overheating problem to me! i'm putting my money of a software issue with the update which was rolled out for the kinect - something not liking the older hardware. i guess theres fewer people around with the old hardware these days as so many old 360's have overheated and died!

has anyone had a similar problem since adding the kinect?
 
It could be that the additional stress from having to process the Kinect data is causing premature failures (additional temps + power draw = push something over the edge), that or the power draw from the Kinect itself (seems the most unlikely tbh) is doing something somewhere.

But you'd think that MS had tested these things to the utter limits, but I can't think of anything else.
 
In the last 2 weeks, I've seen 4 Kinect and Xbox 4GB bundles be returned because the console decided to RROD. Very surprising with a brand new slim under 2 weeks old.
 
Pre 360S units must use a separate PSU for Kinect which I would assume means mostly data goes over the USB. CPU usage is said to have been reduced from 10-15% to single figures and Ubisoft's internal "Kinect expert" Frederic Blais said in OXM (make of that what you will) that it's less than 1% or something like that.
 
Complete non-story, it's just a coincidence. Old 360's RROD, it happens, in these cases it just happened to do it after people have got Kinect. The two are not related, everybody I know who is using Kinect with an old xbox has been absolutely fine.
 
Last edited:
"It's very disappointing. We were planning to have a big New Year's Day party with karaoke microphones and a Take That competition. But now the Xbox is just sitting idle," he said.

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't the take that songs on Take That singstar for the PS3?

Perhaps that's his problem, trying to load a blu ray into an xbox ;)

See these sorts of complaints all the time, early on everyone blamed the games as they would put lego star wars in and the console would RROD. All of a sudden Lego became a console killer and so on.
 
Complete non-story, it's just a coincidence. Old 360's RROD, it happens, in these cases it just happened to do it after people have got Kinect. The two are not related, everybody I know who is using Kinect with an old xbox has been absolutely fine.

As above to be honest. Can't stand lazy reporting.
 
I think it's just people dusting off their rarely used xbox because they have bought kinect. It's an rrod that was waiting to happen anyway. It's probably the same reason why the occasional new release gets the same blame
 
yupp, since so many ppl have bought kinect, and consoles sometimes fail there's bound to be some of the kinect owners boxes go **** up
fairly certain the amount of failures is a tiny fraction of the total number of kinect owners
 
I can see the argument that its just caused by people using their xbox more when they get a new release, but i can safely say thats not the case for me - i regularly use my 360 and have never had a rrod problem before.
I cant see how its an overheating problem as its rrod's as soon as i turn it on but will eventually get going if i persist.
For me, the timing for when I got the update for the kinect and the start of the problem is too close to be written off as a coincidence straight away. if it is, then fair enough. but if i look at whats changed - i got an update from microsoft and started having problems the same night. personally i still suspect its a software problem.

fortunately my 360 will get going if i keep turning it off and on so i don't have to do anything about it straight away. well annoying tho
 
It's not a software problem, and it's not caused by Kinect. Your 360 has started to suffer from RROD just like most of the old consoles have, it's as simple as that. It's nothing to do with overheating either, RROD is a hardware fault. The timing is merely a coincidence.
 
The addition of the kinect and the timing of the failure is WAY too much of a coincidence for my liking. I've googled it and most people seem to be saying it is just a coincidence and its probably just an old xbox whose parts are worn and dying. but to my mind this cannot be a hardware problem! - it fails as soon as i turn it on, but will eventually come on and then is fine. although its got 3 rrod, it doesn't look like an overheating problem to me! i'm putting my money of a software issue with the update which was rolled out for the kinect - something not liking the older hardware. i guess theres fewer people around with the old hardware these days as so many old 360's have overheated and died!

Do you know how fast a CPU/GPU can get up to and beyond standard operating temperatures when there isn't a heatsink on them?

From what I can remember the RROD is just down to poor solder joints that break on the board when it gets hot and warps with the shoddy x-clamp system. Overheating as soon as you turn on is completely plausible if the heat from previous game-time had warped the board as I mentioned above to the point where the heatsink isn't 100% contacting the die of the CPU/GPU.

Of course as someone mentioned, it's also totally plausible that Kinect is adding extra overhead/stress to the 360 which is causing the older components to fail
 
Do you know how fast a CPU/GPU can get up to and beyond standard operating temperatures when there isn't a heatsink on them?

From what I can remember the RROD is just down to poor solder joints that break on the board when it gets hot and warps with the shoddy x-clamp system. Overheating as soon as you turn on is completely plausible if the heat from previous game-time had warped the board as I mentioned above to the point where the heatsink isn't 100% contacting the die of the CPU/GPU.

Of course as someone mentioned, it's also totally plausible that Kinect is adding extra overhead/stress to the 360 which is causing the older components to fail

I've been called in to fix someone's PC that wouldn't boot up because it just shut down within a moment of being switched on. It turned out the heatsink on the CPU had come off because one of the lugs had broken.
 
Back
Top Bottom