Questions on 360 Power Supply

[tonicboy]

Hello all,

I'm new to these forums and to begin with, let me apologize if I am asking noob questions. I really did try to do as much research on this as possible but found that the majority of the advice being given on other sites was truly uninformed and potentially hazardous to my Xbox. I myself am a programmer so I consider myself technical and yet, I know nothing about EE so I find myself in an area of no expertise. I decided that the BenHeck forums must be the one place I can trust that the people know their stuff.

Anyway, I recently moved to Vietnam and brought my Xbox 360 with me. I am not positive about the version, but it is an early generation 20GB Premium which I believe to be a Xenon. At the very least, the power brick is a 203W, 16.5A deal. I've heard on many sites that using a 220v/110v step-down converter can be dangerous, although people often don't specify why. So, I went out and bought what seems to be an official MS 220v power brick.

The problem is, this power brick seems to be for an Xbox 360 Elite. It has a 175W power output, and the plugs are different - there's a tab on the Xbox side that prevents insertion into my old Premium, and the female end of the power brick has two prongs whereas my old one had three. My question is, can I mod this Elite power supply to work with my Xbox Premium? Is there a danger to having my Xbox underpowered?

Or, should I go with a step-down converter? I can't really understand what all the warnings could be for, other than maybe for the possible poor quality of step-down converters. If I go with a good quality converter, can you see any issues here? Thanks in advance for any help!

[Black Six]

I can tell you that the power supplies are only forwards compatible, so you could use your 203W supply on an Elite that came with a 175W supply, but not the other way around. In other words, return the 175W supply, it's useless with your console.

As for the step-down converter, I don't have any experience with that so I'll defer to someone else.

[tonicboy]

Thanks, Black Six. That was my initial guess about the power supply but I guess I was being hopeful because I read on some other forum that some guy removed that middle tab to be able to insert it into his Xbox and it worked. However, I have no idea which Xbox he had and it could very well have been power-compatible but not plug-compatible. Ideally, I would find another local 220v power supply which outputs power rated for my version Xbox, but it was hard enough to find this one, I doubt I could find one for an older version. Thanks for the reply.