That is the point of the “trick†here. You WANT to melt the solder. In an attempt to be “environmentally friendly and do so by an insanely set date for the EU and approaching ones worldwide, Microsoft has used lead free solder which behaves differently and is years behind its lead based counterparts in the electronics industry. The red ring of death is almost exclusively caused by problems related to using lead free solder. If Microsoft had been able to stick with lead solder, there would have been only a minute amount of returns for this general error. Surface mount technology is great and all but when you have poor solder connections to begin with, it is only a matter of time after heating and cooling down, even if you are using liquid cooling as I am, that the connections will deteriorate and become incapable of passing electric current and therefore data along the contacts between the motherboard and CPU or GPU. Tiny droplets are attached to the chips in an oven kept at 220 degrees Celcius and the chip is then placed onto the motherboard where the receiving socket is heated to 220 making the two bond together as it rapidly cools outside of the oven leaving the soldered connections intact. Motherboard warpage does not help but the X brackets are an obvious attempt to compensate for that warpage but can in no way compensate for the bad solder connections. If the ovens had been kept a little bit hotter (the chips and motherboard can handle 240 for up to 40 seconds and even higher for shorter durations), we would not have had these problems even with lead free solder. No doubt, the factories were trying to save money on their power bills by not having to keep the solder ovens as hot all day long. This was a very bad computational error and has cost Microsoft millions as well as individual gamers a ton of grief, money, and satisfied gaming time.
Lead free solder could have still been used if the cooling solutions had been a little better designed and the initial manufacturing with the wave guide soldering line ovens set at only about 4-5 degrees higher.
Even with using liquid cooling for the last 6 months and one of the best thermal conductive lacquers on the market, a dual fan cooling base and higher air flow exhaust fan, and even individual heat sinks added on the video memory on the top of the motherboard I still got the red ring of death.
I would have gone with a better cooling solution from the factory if I had been allowed to design it for Microsoft; like one using R-134a in the heat pipe instead of water under a slight vacuum in a weak attempt to use liquid and phase change cooling on an undersized heat sink with an underpowered exhaust fan pulling air across it.
Anyway, bad solder compounded by low temps caused bad solder connections which is why it has to be reflowed in order to make the connections good again. If you heat the chip and motherboard locally up to 225 for 10 seconds with a heat gun, you should be able to fix most ring of death problems which is what I will do. I am a trained electronics repair technician and have worked in this field for 17 years at the component level and have found half of the problems I encounter can be found by looking for damaged or cold soldered joints.
