Elite Quality and Memory Cards

Two seperate questions:

1. I've heard that the Elite 360 is less likely to get the "three rings of death" (from EGM, maybe?). Can anyone confirm or deny that? I'm going to by my own 360 soon and I wonder if it's worth the extra dough.
2. I have some game saves on my buddy's harddrive. Can I by a memory card and transfer the saves?

At the time the Elite Launched in April, it hada new motherboard revision and a few changes to the internals that made people believe it would be less likely to suffer the RRoD. It is less prone to the RRoD because they essentially epoxied the GPU and CPU to the motherboard to keep it from warping, which was and is considered the single biggest RRoD failure cause.

I have a launch Elite, and it runs just as hot as the other ones, in fact I think it runs hotter than my January 06 premium I had before it. It also featured the worst of the 360s DVD drives, the Hitachi which was the original launch 360 drive that they recycled out to the Elites on launch and do still use on a less frequent occasion still today. It's the loudest and it failed on me just a few days ago in fact. But up until that, no problems and no RRoD from my Elite, but it still ultimately bricked after only 7 months.

Since September however, most if not all 360s being produced have the new Falcon 65nm CPU board, which runs cooler and has even more changes and the BenQ DVD drives are the now predomant drive used, and are the quietest and supposedly most reliable of the drives. This board/drive combination though is used in all 360 models, not just the Elite, and with the inclusion of HDMI ports on all consoles now, the only thing the Elite has is the big HDD and the fact that it is black, but other than that, it doesn't offer any exclusive components internally or port wise over any other 360 console like it did when it launched.

As far as your game save situation. Yes, you can take a memory card and move your saves over to your 360 from your friends. However, all save files are encoded with the creator's gamertag, so if your friend made the save and used his gamertag on hisconsole to play the game. When you transfer them over, they will work fine and you will be able to use the save, but you will NOT be able to gain any achievement points off those saves using your own Gamertag on your own system. So if you care about achievements or your gamerscore, keep that in mind.

Other than that, good luck and enjoy.

1. all the new consoles made after september use the new chipsets apparently, so all consoles are suppose to get teh RRoD less.

2. i should...i know DOA4 when we swapped HDDs, nothing was unlocked on my HDD on my friends 360...despite having unlocked all the characters.