Xbox One Detects and Prevents Overheating

The Xbox 360’s red ring of death and overheating often caused the console to be rendered inoperable, so what have Microsoft done to react to the constant concern of the console overheating?

Microsoft have learned their lesson after the Xbox 360's infamous red ring of death, — Microsoft have learned their lesson after the Xbox 360’s infamous red ring of death claimed the lives many consoles.

In a recent interview, Microsoft’s general manager of console development Leo del Castillo, who has been charged with keeping the console up to date on the hardware side, had this to say about keeping the Xbox One on top of overheating problems.

“The way we designed the box, we don’t actually intend it to ever have to go to maximum speed under normal environmental conditions. But there is overhead. So we’ll allow the fan to go all the way up to its maximum speed and if that solves the condition without the user having to do anything.”

The Xbox 360 constantly ran at maximum speed, which is one of the reasons the hardware was subject to overheating. “With the architecture of the Xbox One, is that we can dial back the power of the box considerably. We had a little less flexibility with the 360.” Sais Castillo.

“And so basically, if we couldn’t dissipate the heat, there wasn’t a whole lot of leverage we could pull to keep the heat from being generated, so we had a limited amount of time before it just shut down. Xbox One can actually dial it back to a lower power state, so low in fact that it can in a mode that uses virtually no air flow.”

The Xbox One has been jam-packed with features designed to keep the console from overheating.

Therefore, the Xbox one can always use its reserves of power and memory capacity to deal with situations where the console is under heavy processing load. However, should the situation arise, warning systems within the software can alert the user to any potential threat to the console’s health.

“If we get to the point where that is no longer enough, we have the mechanism, the interface, to deal with that.” Explained Castillo.

So, the console has backup systems, as well as warning systems, which are designed to prevent the system from failing. These are just some of the innovations that have been added to react to some of the Xbox 360’s deficiencies.

The Xbox One will soon be available in white, and is currently available at good games stores. Isn’t it time you upgraded?

Source: Engadget