The problem with broken 360 explained!

yaye, im glad im waiting until the next batches

 

With a thin little strip of aluminum foil that peals right off and leaves what looks like a more comon thermal pad behind?

 

wish it would have came with a slot loader. *drool*

 

Yea, I figured it would all be speculation, I just thought that there are probably many people on this board that would be able to speculate much better than I could on the subject.

The fan noise is actually one of the things that irritates me the most. The few X360's I've been around I thought were quite noisy, especially the DVD drive. I'm hoping they quiet the fan noise pretty quickly.

 

well teh guys at xbox-scene are saying this is intentional, hard to tell who actually know what they;re talkinga bout though:

 

Well, I have little to add to that quote of yours other than thermal pads don't neccessarily suck, as there are materials out there that are quite good. Other than that, well, not much, except the more layers of [whatever] one has between the heat source and the sink, the worse the efficiency's going to be. So if you have a pad, versus a pad with a layer of foil on top, the one with the foil is going to perform worse.

That's part of why CPUs with integrated heatspreaders on them run hotter than when you pop the cap off them.

*Edit:
Oh, and if there's foil over the pad, that could have some effect on its function... Pads are meant to be sticky and gummy and glue themselves to whatever they're cooling. If there's foil over the surface, a proper bond between them won't be formed which could harm heat transfer... So perhaps the jury's still out on this one.

 

There's no magic involved in heat transfer. Thermal pads are "sticky and gummy" and do conform to the surface of whatever they are meant to cool. A foil is maleable, and sitting on a thermal pad, will do the same. The reason you want something in there, even silicon paste, is because a flat metal heat sink on a flat silicon chip will have little tiny voids between both materials. These voids don't conduct heat well and you have less effective area for heat transfer.

A metal foil will conduct heat better than a thermal pad. The extra layer of material will contribute to more resistance to conduct heat. If hte thermal pad, though, is thinner by the thickness of the foil, it will conduct heat better. The foil can also act as a sort of heat spreader, so any hot spots on the chip will be spread out over the whole surface.

 

Note that this has also been added to the original website's news story:

 

Point of information- a piece of metal needs significant thickness to achieve any sort of heat spreader effect. The less conductive it is (aluminum vs. copper), it needs to be even thicker. A layer of foil will have zero heat spreading capability.

 

MS response

http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/archive/2006/03/10/533618.aspx

 

Nevertheless, a foil is not AS malleable as a gummy pad, and will leave voids and such inbetween the two surfaces. And as already pointed out, foil isn't a capable heatspreader, that's nonsense.

 

Well if the foil is good enough or not remains to be seen. But we atleast know that MS didnt forget to remove them heh,

 

Yeah, the whole "MS forgot to remove the foil" debacle is stupid. ANY thermal pad which has ever had to have something removed before use never used metal foil as the item to be removed.

 

Aluminum has a thermal conductivity of 240 W/(m*K) whereas a pretty good thermally conductive tape will have one of 1.40 W/(m*K) (Silicon is 150 W/(m*K)). Compared to the foil, the thermal tape is a brick wall for heat transfer. You will get a lot of heat trapped behind the thermal tape.

If you could measure temperature on the surface of the GPU while it's running under the heat sink I'm sure you'd find it to be nearly uniform. Despite the fact that heat isn't being generated evenly across it, because of the foil and the tape you should get the same temperature across it.

 

True!

And as I already stated, I don't think the presence of metal foil would impact the heat transfer ability significantly enough to cause the death of the console. Especially if the pad is designed to be used with the foil still present!

 

The miniscule thickness of the material (which does figure into the thermal resistance of the object) should tell you the effect is a lot less in magnitude than a "brick wall". The k is not ideal, yes, but it's not like this is a .050" layer of tape (which would be a brick wall).

The foil is not thick enough to be a heatspreader. Consider that big chunk of metal (the heatsink) that is mounted to that GPU. That might have something to do with evening out the local temperatures, ya think?