[Simon Coates]

Hi all,

Yesterday morning I decided to see if Gears 2 MP has improved (haven't played it for 2 months - BTW it's still crap) - anyway, put in the disk and downloaded the update. Got invited into a Horde game - the screen had loads of video artifacts - small regularly spaced black squares mainly on light textures and reflecting surfaces. Menus, video and 2D arcade games played fine - NXE dash looks OK also, except for the avatar that's now blocky and pixely. Did some Googling to find this is the start of getting an E74 error. My console is about 2 years old so out of warranty

Well, later that day I tried playing Gears 2 on my son's 10 month old Elite. Would you believe it - the very same thing happened. Similar video artifacts to mine, turned his console off and back on - got the dreaded 1 red light and E74 error screen.

Coincidence? or caused by the software? I'm not sure but, today I did the towel trick with my console (not gonna touch the Elite as it's still under warranty) and after getting it nice and hot the problem went away. My son has been off school and played on my console all day COD4, COD5, Orange Box - puts in Gears 2 and straight away gets the very same problem again

Between both of us we're on our 6th console - so 2 more to add to the list!

I've read that Fable 2 has bricked hundreds of consoles but not heard of any problems with Gears 2 (except for multiplayer!!!)

Regards,

Simon

PS. Found some Jaspers in Gamestation Halifax, so guess where I'm going tomorrow!

[Captain Speedy]

I am a big believer that there are no games that brick consoles its just coincidence, but either way dont buy a new console, just send it back to MS as a RROD (as long as its still in the 3 years warranty) and they will repair it, same thing happened to me on sunday and my replacement box is on its way back now!

[shagaboopon]

The only coincidence is that Gears 2 probably pushes the 360 hardware harder than all your other games. It could be a memory fault on the GPU side that doesn't appear unless the memory is nearing full capacity. This is all guesses of course but I'm pretty sure its not Gears 2 that has broken either console but just found the weaknesses.

[knight2000uk]

This is correct, gears 2 all of the call of duty and the majority of high graphical contented games will push the 360 to the limit, more work more heat.
the towel trick will not fix the console, only delay the inevitable red ring of death and most likely doing the towel trick will make things worse, like Ive said to many people, the towel trick has only one use, and thats forcing the red rings so you can send it back to MS and have a free fix if your in 3 years warranty.
The HANA graphics scaller chips most likely needs re-soldering.

Stu

[Simon Coates]

Thanks for the replies.

The more I think about it I believe it is the disk causing the problem.
Don't think heat is the issue as it happened straight away on my console from cold. E74 can also be caused by driver errors - we have two Gears 2 disks and on close inspection one of the disks has a small deep scratch and this disk is causing the issue. The E74 error goes If I remove the hard drive, MU and power - then reconnect power and turn on - then asks to do the update as expected. Then plug in hard drive and reboot.
I can then play any game without a problem - even the good Gears 2 disk. As soon as I put the 'bad' Gears 2 disk in and play the graphics problem comes back. Makes me wonder if the scratch causes a driver to be corrupted and not picked up as a read error.

Can't be the ANA chip as this is a hardware scaler that just handles the different output types and resolutions. Any problems would occur all over the screen. The artifacts must be caused by the GPU as they only appear in certain areas and on certain textures - not all over the screen. Menus, 2D games and the dashboard are not affected at all - except for the 3D rendering of the avatars.

Anyone fancy playing Russian roulette with my Gears disks?

Regards,

Simon

[knight2000uk]

Strange as all the E74's Ive had were fixed with re-soldering the ANA chip
Must be traced link between the two as throughput between the GPU and the ANA to then go to the av port or vice-versa, any re-seating of the GPU did nothing for the more permanent E74's.

Stu