Red Rings bringing your Xbox 360 down for the count? Microsoft's still trying to make ends meet, albeit still a bit too late for some. The big MS is doing it quietly too: the new Xbox 360 Japser motherboards, which supposedly have the RRoD-proof(?) 65nm GPU chips, have been spotted in the wild without much fuss from the console manufacturer.

A poster on the Xbox-Underground forums by the name of Electric Tuner has put up a picture of what he claims is the Opus Xbox 360 motherboard. What is this Opus all about? Find out more information after the jump.

Epic Games CEO and founder Tim Sweeney expressed his opinion on the flagging state of the PC gaming industry. In an interview conducted by TG Daily, he pointed out the different problems the PC marke t is facing as well as some possible solutions the industry can take if it wants to make some headway against its rivals. You can check out the rest of the interview by reading our full article, accessible through the "read more" link below.

When we ran the story on an insider revealing the truth behind Microsoft Xbox 360 system failures, it caused quite a stir. Don't look now, but there's more information coming out with stark consistency to the earlier revelations. Jacob Metcalf, recognized for revealing the Microsoft-Bungie split, says there are two more Xbox 360 chipsets coming after Jasper. Details in the full article.

Microsoft's been under a lot of heat because of the Xbox 360 overheating issue (pun intended). To address this, Microsoft came out with Project Falcon, a new Xbox 360 model sporting the 65nm chip, which will offer a significant reduction in heat. Ben Heck, modder extraordinaire, got the new Falcon model Xbox 360 and tested it against the older Zephyr model in a laptop-type environment. He found that the Falcon runs much cooler than the Zephyr. Details in the full article.

The person who first spread the rumor of Bungie leaving Microsoft which eventually came true, Jake Metcalf from 8BitJoystick, claims he had a chat with someone who worked with Microsoft on the Xbox 360 project for years and knows why the 360 is suffering from hardware failures. If this "insider" is to be believed, Microsoft intends to release a new 360 SKU every year and consoles for the next-generation are already being developed by the platform holders. Head over to the full article for more details.

  

It didn't take very long for first reports of the infamous Halo Red Ring of Death (RRoD) to infect the newly released Halo 3 limited edition Xbox 360 consoles. Despite Microsoft's assurances that the new 65nm CPU/GPU (the Falcon chipset) would reduce cases of the RRoD, the image above shows evidence contrary to this statement.

The main problem was said to lie in the overheating of the GPU. There were also speculations that not all of the limited edition consoles had the supposed Falcon chipset. Either way, this does nothing to change the fact that Microsoft's console is still plagued with a host of hardware problems.

This was hardly the first time that reports of the RRoD has spoiled gamers' experience with this next gen console. Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to provide a truly permanent solution to their console's limitations.

Online site DailyTech reports that an Xbox 360 owner with a gamertag of JWSpeed dissected his new Halo 3 Limited Edition console and found out that it came with the long-promised 65nm CPUs.

Aside from that, the said gamer also noticed a simplified heatsink design for the console. For so long now, gamers have been requesting Microsoft for a solution to the overheating problem suffered by the Xbox 360.

While the company has yet to publicly discussed the issues surrounding the Red Ring of Death, it is a common and popular belief that this is due to the 90nm CPUs' lack of cooling capabilities.

Aside from the already mentioned advantage, shifting to 65nm CPUs will also save Microsoft some money. These chips are smaller and 50% less expensive to manufacture. It is unsure until now, however, whether the GPU has also been moved to 65nm.

 

We have a couple of interesting photos taken by Ash 2006. What you're seeing right now are extended heat sinks on an Xbox 360 GPU from the UK.

"Modded a 360 today and was shocked to find an extension on the gpu heatsink. The guy had just received it back from M$ as he had the 3 red lights," writes Ash2006 in a forum post.

For the non-hardware savvy types out there, a heatsink is basically a device that prevents overheating in a lot of appliances and consumer electronics. In the case of the Xbox 360, it's used to prevent the dreaded three red lights of death which often means that your system is down for the count.

While the common belief is that cooling the system down will prevent the hardware issue, some people in the QJ forums claim that it's caused by faulty manufacturing with the system's memory. It's a sensible point that may hold some proof, but we haven't seen too many details to confirm or debunk it.

There are no clear stats to indicate how rampant or trivial the issue is, but one thing's for sure: Microsoft needs to take a stronger stance on the matter to keep their large install base happy.

While many of the news and talk revolving around Xbox 360 overheating issues have caused much disappointment to the Microsoft camp, many hardware enthusiasts with specialties in "bang for the buck" have foreseen a time their own console would hiccup after feeling the hot exhaust from the back of their unit.

 

And although console gamers usually don't come with the geeky and techie know-how of Banzai Runner hobbyists, an owner of eight failed Xbox 360s finally tapped into his inner geek and got the problem of the Xbox 360 issues down pat.

In response to the surprisingly non-technical explanations of Microsoft's Todd Holmdahl - the man behind the hardware aspects of the next-gen console - Jeremy Anderson gave his own analysis of why the Xbox 360 is failing considerably. And he did that on the comment section of the published interview in question.

Click on Full Article to read Anderson's views on why the Xbox 360 can't alleviate heat well.