Xbox 360 E74 Hardware Failures are on the Rise and Full of Fail

March 21st, 2009, 21:30 Posted By: wraggster

West Virginian Joystiq.com super blogger and Monte Cristo sandwich fanboy Justin McElroy has authored a series of stunning posts that bring the rising trend of a disturbing Xbox 360 error to light.

The E74 error is caused when the "ANA" image scaler chip fails, overheats or there is serious AV connection problem. The hot air flow from the CPU and GPU goes right over the location of the ANA chip so it might be slowly cooked by normal use.

An Xbox 360 that is suffering an E74 error will have the lower-right quadrant of the Ring of Light flash on the front on the console and a multiple languages error message may display that will read "E74. System Error. Contact Xbox Customer Support." or the screen will simply glitch out and display a feild of video snow.

The more disturbing trend is that this errors seems to be affecting Falcon motherboard based Xbox 360 system. The Falcon system has a cooler 65nm CPU and a hot 90nm GPU. The newer Jasper motherboard has both a 65nm CPU and 65nm GPU and hopefully it won't succumb to either the E74 or RROD but only time will tell.

The E74 Error is the annoying cousin of the RROD since while it is not a direct failure of the CPU. GPU or RAM but it is caused by the high amount of heat eventually damaging the ANA chip causing it to fail. While it is true that the rate of RROD errors are dropping but it might bring other hardware failures to light such as the E74 that we never saw because the spot light was on the RROD.

Microsoft's official statement on the E74 error that they sent to Joystiq.com is:
"E74 is a general hardware error on Xbox 360 indicated by a single red flashing light in the Xbox Ring of Light and an error message visible on the television. This error is unrelated to the three flashing red lights error and there is not a single root cause. We encourage anyone who receives this error to contact Xbox Customer support through www.xbox.com/support or 1-800-4-MY-XBOX. The majority of customers who own Xbox 360 consoles continue to have a terrific experience from their first day, and continue to, day in and day out."

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