In a very little known article posted on the Gamespot UK website back in September, a survey conducted by warranty company Squaretrade has found that less than 4% of new Xbox 360's fail due to the Red Red of Death. This is largely in part to the new Jasper chip inside of the console which greatly reduces heat and power consumption. From the article,
SquareTrade found that Xbox 360 quality has improved dramatically since the third quarter of 2008, shortly before the 65nm CPU/GPU "Jasper" model was introduced. Since then, first-year failure rates have plummeted to below the 4 percent the company projected. Looking at 500 units purchased in 2009, SquareTrade found that less than 1 percent had suffered the Red Ring of Death.
This is really great news for Microsoft's Xbox 360 after previous surveys have shown the 360 to fail 30% to 50% of the time before Jasper was released. Heading into the holidays, consumers should no longer have to fear that their console will get the RRoD if they get a 360 for Christmas or plan on buying one for someone else.
This article was posted back in September so why has nobody heard of this yet? Why was this news not being spread like wildfire? Obviously this latest survey is not the be-all end-all (after all they did only look at 500 Jasper consoles, not a very large sample size) but does give a more reasonable and seemingly accurate result than the exaggerated surveys of the past.
