The dreaded ”red ring of death" is a sight many Xbox 360 owner hope they never have to bear witness to. You see, when the ring of lights on the front of your console turn from their usual shade of soothing green to an angry red, it means your 360 has just gone to console heaven and your gaming days are over. Temporarily at least.

Turns out that when Microsoft is repairing the broken consoles it’s actually replacing the existing heatsink with a new, presumably more efficient, design. How do we know this? Well in a shocking display of recklessness and showing blatant disregard for those little silver ”void your warranty" stickers, some overly keen readers over at Team Xbox have ripped open their freshly repaired consoles to have a nosey at the insides. To their surprise they found a completely new cooling mechanism installed.

Does this mean that the original heatsinks were faulty? Could the original coolers be the cause of the rising number of (anecdotally) reported console failures? And are these new coolers being installed into brand new Xbox 360s?

We’ve not heard any official word from Microsoft about this nor have we heard if any locally repaired consoles have this fancy new heatsink installed. Without wanting to be seen encouraging people to void their warranties, please let us know if you’ve been bold enough to crack open your newly repaired Xbox 360.