Theres not realy a performance benifit. I do it to mod the halo .maps funny as hell. Also ripping games is good. Rent then, rip them, return them. Guess who is currently building a site that sells modded xbox's?.... you guessed it... me. you can post to me and i'll fit a mod chip for you (if bought from me)EDIT: What is cool is: if you know what your doing you can remove the adverts from the start of a game. Also running OSX and uBuntu is cool.There is a way for double the amount of ram. (around 150 tiny pins to solder per chip. there is 2 chips The only way to mess it up is to delete something. which would be idiotic. plus... you can 'unmod' your xbox after being softmodded. :)I have messed up lots of xbox's thats how you learn, hey? If you mess up on a softmod, this can be fixed with a modchip. if you mess up on soldering this means, new xbox i reccomend starting with a softmod or get a mod chip installed