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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • There’s a ton of old rumors and “fixes” but it was recently confirmed by Microsoft that the main issue was failure of the flip chip interposer connections caused by incorrectly engineered underfill epoxy on early batches of GPUs. This is the same issue behind Nvidia’s Bumpgate and likely the PS3 YLODs.

    BGA solder balls, x-clamps, thermal paste, overheating, etc were never actually a real issue. Heat gunning/towel tricking the console just warped chips enough that they temporarily made contact and would work for a little while. Only permanent fix is to replace the GPU with one made after they changed underfill epoxies.

    Now that these consoles are 20+ years old there’s also aging caps and whatnot to worry about too.




  • I daily drive a clapped out 80s sports car with no AC and a broken radio. The true connection you can feel to a classically engineered machine when there’s zero distraction or convenience is hard to describe. You learn every noise, every smell, every quirk of handling and weight transfer, gain intuition about how the chassis will react to every abnormality in the road surface, have the shifter and clutch become subconscious muscle memory where you don’t even realize you’re doing it, etc. There’s a variety of reasons the average person should drive a newer car but I personally love an old hooptie.





  • Years ago my friend group was heavily into Beat Saber, custom maps, the whole deal. We played at least 3 hours a day, every day, all piling into a dorm and taking turns on a Vive until we were so tired we couldn’t move. After graduating and moving I hadn’t bothered to set the whole VR rig back up again. I finally dusted it off a few months ago and holy crap have I gotten out of shape. It took me a good 12 hours of playing to get into the swing of things and several more hours to hit full pace but I’m back. I’ve lost 12 lbs too - this game’s intense.