Thermalright TR-360 Quad pipe Xbox 360 GPU Heatsink review

 Introduction:

So you too have that hot box 360 from Microsoft. Finally some good cooling solution manufacturer heard the scream of the old Xbox 360 owners and finally build the Tr-360 to remove heat from GPU,the primary reason for Red Ring of Death in the console.So in case you want to prolong the usage of the console and avoid the infamous red ring of death, Thermalright found a solution for you.Its a quad pipe GPU Heatsink TR-360.

So in this summer,I started to seek a solution to solve the heat issue of my old console and whilst googling, I came across the aftermarket console cooling solutions by Thermalright and Koolance.
The cooling solution by Koolance was the liquid cooling set-up and was expensive for me to invest on an old console.Thus I decided to purchase the Tr-360 from ebay.

The Packaging:

The packaging of the Tr-360 was simple.Packed in a brown box with thermalright logo,no fancy colors or so at all.

 

A Closer Look

Inside the box,we have the heatsinkalong with the Thermalright Chillfactor 2 thermal paste.Lets take a closer

 

To add to the surprise,Thermaright peopl haven't included any instruction manual about installing the heatsink.

Specifications

As clearly seen the picture, the Tr-360 is a quad heatpipe solution made to cool the GPU of the Xbox 360 console.It is a very good replacement over the stock aluminium heatsink by Microsoft.

Testing

Lets come to the console and turn it on to note the temperature at ideal state and at load state.

The temperatures in the above picture is at the start of console.It has been hardly 1 minute since starting the console and the temperatures are


CPU 75.7 C
GPU 58 C
Memory 57 C
Case 34.6 C

And after the approx 10 minute long gameplay, the temperatures were as shown in the picture above

CPU 81.8 C
GPU 69.6 C
Memory 69.1 C
Case 38 C

So lets disconnect the console and open it up.

Start by removing the hard drive and then the faceplate

After face plates, the upper and lower meshes have to be removed.Lets do with lower one first.

and then the upper one.

Then open up the body, there is a metallic case inside the plastic body of the console.

Then use your T10 Screwdriver to open up the metallic case.Please note that I am not going into the deep details for opening the console.Also my console have xclamps removed.The installation procedure will be differ in case you have xclamps.

 After removing all screws and complete dismantling, we are left with the following.The upper Heatsink(with heatpipe) is the Cpu heatsink and lower Aluminium one is the GPU Heatsink.To add to my surprise,the MS used the small Aluminium Heatsink instead of heatpipe one like in the cpu heatsink.

 Lets remove the Heatsink and now, we need to clean the old thermal paste using some cotton and rubbing alcohal to have a shiny surface.

Now apply the new Thermalright Chillfactor 2 at the centre of the GPU and press the heatsink downwards so that the thermal paste covers all the chip.I did same for the CPU heatsink.

Then we are left with the paste print on surface of heatsink as shown above.

While fitting the heatsink, I noticed that  a capacitor was touching the heatpipe from GPU, so I bent that pipe a little to avoid any contact between the two and inserted a puff insulator in between to minimize heat transfer.

Now,its time to assemble the whole system after fitting the heatsink.

Now lets check how much  temperatures we have dropped.

Well as seen above, there  is a good amount of drop in temperatures.

CPU 58.7 C
GPU 41.9  C
Memory 41.4 C
Case 33.4 C

Lets check it out after gameplay.

As seen in the pic, the temperatures were


CPU 70.2 C
GPU 53.7  C
Memory 52.7 C
Case 33.4 C

Thats a massive improvement over the previous temperatures.The air coming from the exhaust of console is even more hotter than before the installation of the heatsink.It clearly means that more heat is being removed from the GPU.

Conclusion:

The Tr-360 is a very good solution to cool down the console and thus avoid RRod. From the before and after installation temperatures, the Tr-360 has proved its potential and Thermalright have shown that they can do well in the console cooling as well.TR360 is for those who are overly conscious for the console and like to avoid any problems caused by heat.

Pros-

Excellent cooling results

Cons-

1)No instructional manual.
2)Covers the CPU heatsink from 3 sides and thus the temperature of CPU rises more quickly.
3)Heatsink touches with capacitor in old xenon consoles and sometimes with the air duct
4)A little messy to install.