Someone has been falling down on the job For those that may have been having heat-up issues with your Xbox 360, some folks from the German Xbox modding scene have encountered what may be the cause of some of those problems.They uncovered that some Xbox 360 units have been shipping with the protective foil left in place that covers the GPU heatsink compound during shipping from the manufacturer. With the foil in place, heat cannot be properly transferred from the ATI GPU to the heatsink.This protective layer is probably placed by the manifacturer of the heatsink and is used to protect the heat transfer pad from dust, but should normally be removed just prior installing the heatsink on the GPU. The way it's installed now by MS the GPU chip makes contact with the protection foil instead of the heat transfer pad. This can of course cause cooling issues for the graphics chip as for optimal cooling performance there should just be a thin layer of thermal pad between the GPU chip and heatsink.
I heard the the foil is the thermal transfer material....