Xbox 360 "ICE" mod chip claims debunked

Photos purporting to be of mod-chip devices for the Xbox 360, posted by a group claiming to be preparing to launch such a chip in the coming weeks, are amateur fakes - with no sign as yet that any such chip is close to release.

The ICE Mod Chip team claims to be close to releasing a chip for the Xbox 360 which will allow the booting of Xbox 360 "ISOs, Rips and Dumps", and has websites based in both the USA and UK.

However, pictures posted to both sites late last week - and promptly removed from the US site, although not the UK site - reveal the whole thing to be a hoax, as the devices they show are not console chips at all, but standard commercially available microcontroller boards with the "I.C.E. v1.0" text written over them.

The pictures, taken from the internet sites of electronics retailers, show devices which could not possibly be used as console modchips - in the case of the device which is still visible on the frontpage of the UK site, a low-powered microcontroller which is several orders of magnitude too slow to communicate at the data speeds used within the Xbox 360.

A number of other reports regarding the ICE "chip" have pointed out that the websites for the chip are owned by the same person as Canadian modding firm InfinityMods.com - which is a supplier of mod chips, not a developer of them. InfinityMods' website claims that it plans to take pre-orders for the $70 chip in the coming weeks.