Does the Xbox 360 overheat as much when watching movies as it does when playing games?
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at
5:24 am
I use my xbox as a DVD player and just recently started watching Netflix on it as well. I’ve noticed that it barely makes any sound at all when playing movies, but a lot more when playing games. I use it fairly often for movies and don’t want it to overheat. Has anyone overheated their Xbox 360 from watching DVDs or Netflix?
Tagged with: dvd • dvd player • dvds • netflix • playing games • Xbox • xbox 360
Filed under: Gaming
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Highly unlikely when watching movies. When playing games on the 360, the console is using what is called the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit). This chip is what fails on the 360 9 times out of 10 creating the red ring of death error. When watching a movie it is simply using the GPU as a light buffer between the disc and what you see on screen. Higher end games demand more use out of the GPU causing it to overheat due to poor engineering and airflow.
Overheating in an Xbox is more an issue of the hardware inside than the actual use of the console itself. You console will be performing harder when playing full games vs arcade games or watching movies so it will be working harder. Generally the hardware is built with the fan providing enough spin to prevent an overheat. The number one reasons 360’s experience overheating is just bad engineering in the older models. If you have a newer 360 it shouldn’t overheat at all, if it does I’d recommend taking full advantage of the Microsoft warranty and getting them for every penny their worth for selling you a bummed 360.
No games take up a lot more space just like the computer, if you have something on which takes more to play it will be slower, laggy, an more often to freeze.
It doesn’t make much sound when streaming Netflix because you don’t need a disk in the drive to do this. The sound you here when playing a game is the disk spinning. Moving parts cause heat so the 360’s fans have to come on more often to cool it down, causing more noise. A 360 can overheat no matter what you use it for. The red ring of death is cause by the chip set overheating. With the newer models, this problem has been reduced.
It reads less data on the DVD than an xbox 360, you will find it will use the fan a lot at the beginning because it is buffering the whole movie, after it has done that then it will run smoothly, only using some setting. where as on games it has to keep reading more and more data