You would not have to spend much time googling 'overheating' before running into a story about somebody's Xbox 360 dying a hot death. The Xbox 360's original aluminum heatsink has been shown to be less than a 100% effective cooling solution for Microsoft's latest console. Fortunately, the friendly folks at Microsoft might have come with a better solution, in the form of a new and improved heatsink. Unfortunately however, so far, these better cooling measures have only been turning up in Europe.
Logic-Sunrise, a gaming site in France, was first to break the news of the "nouvelle configuration hardware pour la 360." The new heatsink -- a two piece cooler with a copper heatpipe attached to a healthy sized aluminum heatsink -- appears to be a much better revision of the standard, stock Xbox 360 cooling solution. The new heatsink fits right on top of the Xbox 360's Xenos GPU, and looks like it might even be robust enough to handle exceptionally long gaming sessions of Halo 3 -- or maybe even another big French heatwave.
According to
MaxConsole, this new heatsink also turned up in a Microsoft-repaired console in the Czech Republic. Time will tell whether or not this revised cooling option will be offered in North America.
forums
Thousands visiting the site that addresses the issues with the defective xbox 360 Game Console http://www.xbox360defective.com
Does this mean that Microsoft will Recall all defective 360s?
No way. Microsoft will do what every major manufacturer facing a potential recall does.
1. Ignore it until it's so obvious it hurts.
2. Fain responsibility until they have to admit their fault.
3. Have their financial assessment division assess weither or not it would be cheaper to issue a recall and repair defective products or to simply pay any lawsuits they would face or to fix the products of those customers who complain enough.
They'll basically weigh their options and won't do a thing unless you're persistent enough to hound them into fixing the problem.
Quite simply; if they pretend that it's not broke, they're not gonna fix it.