Nylon washers or metal on an Xbox 360 Repair Kit? : eBay Guides

1 - Nylon washers will fix your Xbox... for 2 months...

and then you'll have a stuffed Xbox! Because the whole point of the x-clamp fix is to hold down the heatsinks tight
against the chips so when they pour out the excess heat that the 65nm process creates the heatsinks won't budge.

If you put plastic there and put it under high heat and pressure it's only going to do one thing.... squish!

Heat-treated nylon will not cope any better than any other type of plastic. Within months you'll find the heatsinks
are not held down properly... which is the old problem in using the original MS x-clamps!

2 - Metal washers cannot short your Xbox...

Your Xbox 360 uses Microsoft’s METAL x-clamps and that hasn't shorted from new, has it?

Microsoft put copper rings where the metal washers sit (an expensive metal but very good at grounding things).
It would be far cheaper - if they were looking to insulate that part of the board - to paint over it but they don’t
because the copper rings are an EARTHING POINT!

You'll see copper rings are all over the board and the board itself rests on the metal case and the x-clamps (metal)
touch both the motherboard and the metal case.

The reason Microsoft have gone to all the trouble to properly ground the heatsinks and other parts
is to prevent the very real danger of static electricity build-up.

If you take off the front face of your 360 you'll see an aluminium-foil earthing strap on the front of the CDROM drive
that links the drive to the case. When you spin a piece of plastic (the CD) very fast there is a potential to build up
static electricity so that's why the earth strap is there - don't forget to stick it back on when you reassemble your Xbox!

3 - The Xbox 360 'Floating Earth' myth:

One of my competitors thinks (bizarrely) that the Xbox 360 has a floating earth;

"Fact: The Xbox 360 has no ground earth like a PC. It has a floating earth system also known as
an insulated earth. Basically it's a system where the Xbox's electrical system is isolated from the
casings metalwork." – ...he says.

He’s only quoting from numerous forums where people who have no electrical knowledge have said similar things.
As any Electrician will tell you, a floating earth means you have a fault in your system and that’s going to give you
a jolt of electric as soon as you touch it.

I’ll let Wikipedia explain; "Floating grounds [earths] can become a hazard both to other electrical equipment and operators.
if a person is in contact with both the equipment and a real ground point, they may act as a conductor and can be electrocuted."

Microsoft may be rich, but even they wouldn’t be able to cope with 30,000,000 lawsuits for having an Xbox with a floating earth!

4 - Nylon washers are NOT an insulator...

If you wanted to isolate the entire Xbox motherboard from the case (and why would you when Microsoft make such a point of
grounding everything they can to the case?) then you’d need to;

1) cover the top of the CPU heatsink.
2) use nylon BOLTS so the metal heatsinks (which touch the CPU and GPU after all) don’t ground with the metal case.
3) cover up all the copper rings that the long bolts go through.
4) put masking tape all around the outside of the board where it touches the chassis.
 
And all that would achieve is a build up of static electricity on the board that has nowhere to go. Zap!

5 - 15,500+ feedback...

I've sold more x-clamp kits than anyone else IN THE WORLD and that’s a fact.

23,000 kits and 15,500+ positive feedback - all buying metal washer kits.

Most of the bad 'x-clamped' Xboxes I get in to fix have nylon washer kits - (the rest are wrong-sized washers, drill-thru kits
or cheap thermal paste). Even heat-treated nylon can't cope with the extremes of heat the Xbox generates and will only be a
short-term fix at best. With a metal washer kit you know that in a year the washers will be exactly the same size as the day
you fitted them. Nylon is a plastic – put it under heat and pressure and it will squish (I think that’s the technical term!)

There is a reason I have been the Worldwide No.1 seller of x-clamp kits
for over 3 years:- metal-washer kits work!

Side note: the reason that people use nylon is a throwback to the llamma website drill-thru kits which used 1 nylon and
1 metal washer (1.3mm nylon and 0.8mm metal) to get the exact height needed to stop the chips getting crushed. That's
because finding 1.05mm metal washers isn't easy. If you buy my kits you will see that 16 washers stacked up is 17mm
(so 1.05mm each) which makes them the perfect height for the x-clamp fix (and in 3 years they'll be the same height!)