Stock o modified, sakit talaga ng unang XBox 360 yang 3RL. Kaka-rush ng Microsoft ilabas yang 360 sa market, na-leche ang quality control ... if there was any at all.

It's basically an issue about overheating. When the temperature inside the console gets too hot, the mobo warps a bit and the solder points of the CPU (or GPU) suffer hairline cracks ... resulting in hardware failure hence the indication on the front panel of the three red lights of death. AFAIK, Microsoft began using a new motherboard on consoles made from June 2006 (yata). Incidentally, the new XBox 360 Falcon uses less power. It comes with a smaller 175w power supply.

Anyway, all XBox 360's now have a 3yr warranty on 3RL (and on 3RL only) and covers even the earliest XBox 360's. For other failures the standard 1 year warranty applies.

My Xbox 360 was among those prone to 3RL. It has gone kaput 2 days ago. It's the graphics chip that went bust (E74 error code, one single red light). It's more than a year old, so it's out of warranty ... and since it's not 3RL, I was told by MS that they would have to charge me to fix it and the repair will take 4 to 6 weeks.

I still think it was worth the [SIZE=4][SIZE=2]£[/SIZE][/SIZE]300+ we paid for it more than 2 years ago.