Just wanted to share my experience and hopefully save a few 360's from the ring of death.
My buddy smokes a lot and after about a year of having his 360 it stopped playing backups and we noticed that the fan noise was getting so loud that it was apparent that something was wrong. I'm a systems engineer so I volunteered to crack the case, do some of the fan shroud mods and change the thermal compound on the CPU & GPU.
Anyone who smokes and has opened their PC knows that cigarette smoke and dust mix and are attracted to heat. The problem with the 360 is that the amount of heat it generates actually liquefied the tar from the smoke and caused both heatsinks to become completely clogged with a dust-tar mix. Their are also stains on the DVD drive and the case above the CPU heatsink. The worst part was that the GPU heatsink heated up the DVD drive to the point that there was tar everywhere inside the DVD drive, including the laser which has causing backups not to play at all and many unreadable disc errors on originals. Replacing the laser resolved all issues with both backups and originals.
The GPU thermal compound was actually a thermal pad, which over many heating and cooling cycles develops cracks in the compound, resulting in less transfer of heat to the heatsink. I believe this may be the cause of many rings of death. I highly recommend replacing the pad with some arctic silver compound. The CPU wasn't nearly as bad and actually had some silver in the compound they used. I still recommend replacing it completely with arctic silver.
Finally, adding cardboard to the fan shroud to direct the air thru the heatsinks individually made a huge difference. What I did was add a piece of between the two fans and added cardboard to the top of the shroud that was long enough to cover the top of each heatsink. You can barely even hear the fans now and the DVD drive is noticeably cooler.
Hope this helps some people out there having trouble and maybe saves a few consoles. Also, thanks to everyone here for the tips, I wouldn't have figured a lot of this out without reading about others problems.
My buddy smokes a lot and after about a year of having his 360 it stopped playing backups and we noticed that the fan noise was getting so loud that it was apparent that something was wrong. I'm a systems engineer so I volunteered to crack the case, do some of the fan shroud mods and change the thermal compound on the CPU & GPU.
Anyone who smokes and has opened their PC knows that cigarette smoke and dust mix and are attracted to heat. The problem with the 360 is that the amount of heat it generates actually liquefied the tar from the smoke and caused both heatsinks to become completely clogged with a dust-tar mix. Their are also stains on the DVD drive and the case above the CPU heatsink. The worst part was that the GPU heatsink heated up the DVD drive to the point that there was tar everywhere inside the DVD drive, including the laser which has causing backups not to play at all and many unreadable disc errors on originals. Replacing the laser resolved all issues with both backups and originals.
The GPU thermal compound was actually a thermal pad, which over many heating and cooling cycles develops cracks in the compound, resulting in less transfer of heat to the heatsink. I believe this may be the cause of many rings of death. I highly recommend replacing the pad with some arctic silver compound. The CPU wasn't nearly as bad and actually had some silver in the compound they used. I still recommend replacing it completely with arctic silver.
Finally, adding cardboard to the fan shroud to direct the air thru the heatsinks individually made a huge difference. What I did was add a piece of between the two fans and added cardboard to the top of the shroud that was long enough to cover the top of each heatsink. You can barely even hear the fans now and the DVD drive is noticeably cooler.
Hope this helps some people out there having trouble and maybe saves a few consoles. Also, thanks to everyone here for the tips, I wouldn't have figured a lot of this out without reading about others problems.