Probing the Guts Of the Consoles

Max Entropy writes "Finally, an in-depth article of the technologies within the GameCube, PS2, and Xbox. The article covers architectures, processor/memory silicon, I/O, expandability, and storage among a host of other topics." If you are wondering what makes each system distinctive (Besides the fact that one has about a hundred times as many games, one overheats, and another has Luigi) this might be worth a read.

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overheats??

[Anonymous Coward]

If i remember right, demo xboxes were supposedly overheating because they were in very enlosed cases with little room for air to circulate to cool it off.

I have not heard a thing about production xboxes off the shelf that are overheating. In fact, I have not seen anything about overheating, BSODs occuring at all.

Editors, if you have any evidence for your allegations, please provide them, otherwise you look just like bitter fools spreading FUD.

Re:overheats??

[Osty]

If i remember right, demo xboxes were supposedly overheating because they were in very enlosed cases with little room for air to circulate to cool it off.

More than that, the possibility that those units were overheating was nothing more than speculation. The only units that ever had problems were those running earlier demo discs, and it was announced that the demo discs were bad -- they were built for the XDK box which has twice the memory (for development purposes), rather than the production XBox, and so would often step past the potential memory space of the real XBox (see how the XBox isn't a PC? If it were, it'd use that nice hard drive as virtual memory, but it doesn't because it's not a PC. Oh, sure, a game could implement its own virtual memory handler, but that has to be done on a per-game basis, as with any console ...). Thus, software problem, not hardware problem. The possibility of overheating was just Slashdot jerking its collective knee.

GSODs and BSODs

[Glonk]

The BSODs and GSODs you hear of are actually not true. The "GSOD" you saw online is actually a disc error (inserting the wrong type of disc) into the XDK, not even the final Xbox (Next time you see it, check out the bottom).

If the Xbox crashes or freezes, you don't get ANY type of message. It'd just lock up (read the documentation). Same as the other consoles.

So somehow I actually doubt your "number of friends" got GSODs in games.

I've had my Xbox since launch day: No crashes, no freezes, no problems, and certainly no overheating.

I'm buying a Gamecube.

[Sludge]

I've played all three systems (as well as many other consoles), and I think that the Gamecube is the best bet for the type of game I want to play.

When I want single player FPS action, I'll play games on my PC, where I have a mouse, keyboard, cable modem and an excellent 21" Sony Trinitron monitor. So far, the dark and gritty games are still done best on the PC, and this seems to be the major targets of the XBox and PS2.

Enter Gamecube, a system with games that are commonly colourful and very party oriented. If I'm going to be playing console games, I want to play them with my friends around a big TV. When I pick up my Gamecube, I'm definately grabbing Super Monkey Ball and Super Smash Bros. along with three additional controllers.

As a PC Gamer, I see the XBox and PS2 for people who don't have near top of the line PC hardware. I see the Gamecube's function as being something a bit different, and it's very attractive. I can't get that over here.

Besides, it looks like we're going to see some impressive first party titles. Is it possible not to be interested in a Zelda game on mass storage media for the first time?