http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3472
"What does all of this have to do with the Xbox 360 and its RRoD problems? Although ATI made the switch to eutectic bumps with its GPUs in 2005, Microsoft was in charge of manufacturing the Xenos GPU and it was still built with high-lead bumps, just like the failed NVIDIA GPUs. Granted NVIDIA's GPUs back in 2005 and 2006 didn't have these problems, but the Microsoft Xenos design was a bit ahead of its time. It is possible, although difficult to prove given the lack of publicly available documentation, that a similar problem to what plagued NVIDIA's GPUs also plagued the Xbox 360's GPU. "
So if ATI was responsible for the manufacturing they would have used the eutectic bumps and the problem might not have been so severe. Also, if you take a look at the heatsinks for the CPU and GPU in the 360, you'll see the GPU heatsink was woefully inadequate compared to the CPU heatsink. Those design decisions were made by Microsoft, not ATI. I'm not trying to prove ATI is infallible or something (their cards aren't exactly the greenest available and I hope they work on their cooling solutions to make them quieter while cooling at a decent level like most of nV's cards...too bad my waterblock didn't fit the 260 or 280 otherwise I could have got one of those) but the specific example you used was inaccurate.
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