Slashdot Mirror
New Xbox 360 S Uses Less Power, Makes Less Noise
Vigile writes "Microsoft unveiled a new Xbox 360 S console at E3 this month, and without delay the new machine has been dissected and tested. The most dramatic change is the move to a single-chip CPU/GPU hybrid processor that is apparently being built on the 45nm process technology from GlobalFoundries, AMD's spun-off production facilities. With the inclusion of the new processor, the Xbox 360 S uses much less power (about 30-40%) compared to previous generation machines, and also turns out to be much quieter as a result of a single, larger fan. This article has photographic evidence of the teardown, with comparisons between this Valhalla platform and the older Falcon system, along with videos of the reconstruction process and noise comparisons."
The new console also takes measures to protect itself from overheating, so RRoDs shouldn't be a problem with this revision.
Thanks for the inline marketing, Slashdot.
It has the evil eye of Sauron, watching us before it attacks! Look at the pics of it before it shuts down due to overheating! No it is my PRECIOUS!
However not everything has improved, the Xbox360 Slim still scratches DVD just like the old one. I guess installing a few rubber pads would have been to complicated.
On the positive side there are rumors that the Dpad on the controller has been improved, however thats still a rumor and so far I haven't found photos of a disassembly of the controller.
The new console also takes measures to protect itself from overheating, so RRoDs shouldn't be a problem with this revision.
They shouldn't have been a problem with any revision.
Its an excellent dissection, i just bought a new elite in march. now ill have to try sell it and get one of these. Just the drop in noise alone makes it worthwhile for me.
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
This might be considered a stupid question but...
The performance of this version will be the same as before, right?
Could it be? How is this possible in this day and age? I am impressed like, eh, like, hm, like yesterday's news. USA has a soccer team?
...for implementing technological improvements.
New Xbox 360 S Uses Less Power, Makes Less Noise
...Has Less Cooling, Still Overheats
Why is it all hardware is set by default to run just barely below the overheat point? It just makes it more likely to die, sitting at those temperatures and then you have to replace it... wait, answered my own question.
Because customers like their hardware fast, cheap, small, and quiet?
If you make it slow, you barely have to bother cooling it.
If you make it expensive, you can invest in high-quality thermal engineering, loads of heat pipes, and whatever else is necessary.
If you make it big, you can just slap an obnoxiously gigantic heatsink and a couple of 120mm(or larger) fans on it, and it'll be fine.
If you make it loud, the magical world of 15k RPM fans is open to you(y hello thar, 1U servers...).
The fact that Microsoft are pretty much n00bs at hardware certainly didn't help the 360; but the industry-wide trend toward badly undercooled hardware, even wimpy stuff like routers that draw under 10 watts for the whole system and still flake out when it gets warm, can hardly be ascribed to their incompetence.
Less cooling my arse. It has a much larger heat-sink and a proper 120mm fan bolted right on top of it. It's got comparable cooling to my enthusiast desktop. Not to mention the simple, inescapable thermodynamic certainty that a machine that is consuming less electrical power will produce less heat.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The Xbox 360 we should have got 5 years ago...
Since when is moving a unit while a disc is spinning a good idea? I've always assumed such a thing isn't a good plan. At the speeds those discs spin, there is going to be a non-trivial amount of gyroscopic force. Given that with normal DVD drives like you find in desktop computers and DVD players and the 360 the disc just floats on the spindle, movement wouldn't be good.
Now something like a laptop drive is more designed for that sort of thing, it grips the disc directly and has less room for it to move around. Of course there's tradeoffs including a higher cost, and lower speeds. However even then I try to keep the thing sitting still when it is reading something.
Just because something can't resist any and everything doesn't mean it has a "defect". There are real physical issues you have to contend with. My car won't survive a 40mph impact with a wall, it will crumple to the point it is destroyed. However, it isn't defective (in fact it is designed to fail so that the bodies inside it do not).
the XBox360 was not designed as a portable platform
A lot of platforms that aren't ostensibly portable get used as such. Case in point: a game console run off an inverter in a minivan or RV for 3-hour road trips. These subject a machine to whatever road vibration the suspension doesn't absorb.
But did Microsoft take support for XNA Creators Club out of the Xbox 360 S the way Sony took support for Linux out of the slim PS2 and took support for Other OS out of the slim PS3?
The thing is both Nintendo and Sony managed to pull off backward compatibility with the Wii and PS3. (Well ok, it got dumped from the PS3 later on but it was there at first.) Plus it is more convenient to play them on the 360 for a number of reasons. For one I generally don't have my Xbox hooked up because I have no room to do that. (It was pretty huge and they didn't make the top flat so you can't put it in a stack of consoles. If they had just made the system flat on top I'd probably have my XBox hooked up right now.) Plus on top of that when I play an old game on the 360 it gets upscaled and I have the cables for HD play. With the XBox I don't even have component cables. (Mostly because I didn't get an HD TV until after I got my 360 so I never got around to it.) Anyway it would have been nice if I could play all my old XBox games on the 360. (Since that upscaling does make it look a bit nicer.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Because customers like their hardware fast, cheap, small, and quiet?
Indeed, the ideal woman.
If only they had done that the first time......
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
I'm impressed with the clever solution they had to this: replace the red LEDs with green ones. Guaranteed, no more red ring of death. Just don't ask about the green ring of death.
Yah well, they may call the newer XBox 360's -' XBox 360's' but they aren't the same and the games being made now aren't the same either - I have an older XBox 360 and it flat out won't play the newer games. At least with computer games it gives some indication of which computers can play the game - here there is consumer fraud where the machines are represented as the same but that's not the case. The new consoles should be called XBox 365's and just freaking label the new games like Red Dead Redemption as exclusives for the 'New' XBox 365.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Isn't the 360 something like 5 years old? Rather than releasing a new console, they just put a new face on it? Oh, and FINALLY managed to fix a problem that was nearly bricking every machine. Pathetic.
I've seen absolutely no indication whatsoever of anything that backs up your claims (in fact, the game you mention came out before the 360 S, and the Wikipedia article on the topic doesn't contain any instances of the word "Slim"). Older revisions of the 360 are more prone to overheating, don't have built-in WiFi, and may have different ports - for example, the oldest models lack an HDMI port - but their CPUs and GPUs execute the same code at the same speed, they have the same amount of RAM, and they run the same OS* as the new Slim model. Kinect works just fine on older consoles. The new console may look different, but it runs exactly the same games.
* I'm assuming you keep your console's OS up to date, typically done via the Internet but I believe it's possible with a DVD as well. Unless you've modded your console, the update process is completely trivial. If you *have* modded it, they *you* are the one with the XBox 365 (or perhaps 355), not "Microcrap" (as you so very maturely refer to the company whose product you chose to purchase).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You can do what the guy in this video does with his GameCube. Yes, I have high standards.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Pshaw! Flimflam! I piss on your silly laws of thermodynamics!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm 2 years running into my 20 gig Xbox 360 unit. I really wish Microsoft would reduce the hard drive add-on prices to more realistic levels. The casing around the HD can't cost THAT much. It would almost be better to just buy the new slim unit(that has over 10 times the hard drive space I have) than to buy the 250 gig drive alone.
I could buy a 1 terabyte drive for my system for less than they charge for a 120 gig unit.
Not to nitpick, but loss to heat is a percentage that varies from device to device. It's theoretically possible for a device that uses less electricity to run a lot hotter.
I have around 170 retail XBox 360 games, I've had 4 XBox's due to 3 RROD failures in the early years.
Sunshine and fun are your friends.
Because when we had high power computers that continued to cool to their best effort, people complained about how noisy they were. By the time you add 3-4 cooling fans and have them running at full power, things get quite noisy. So, you have to use some sort of tradeoff. From the perspective of a console maker, why not run it at some high temperature like 85C? If you have confidence that you can keep it from getting to 95C (or wherever is dangerous), running at a single temperature seems to have the least number of physical stresses. Additionally, at 85C, when you have an ambient of 30C or less, that amount of thermal delta means you can dissipate a lot of power with only a little air flow.
If by strategy you mean "trying to get tax discounts in the EU and failing," then yes.
You're confusing Other OS on the PS3 with Basic on the PS2. As I understand it, Other OS was there to get developers familiar with the Cell architecture, which Sony planned to use in all sorts of consumer electronics devices. Cell's seven integrated DSPs were supposed to be the future of signal processing until someone figured out how to "abuse" the GPU to act as a generic DSP. This led to CUDA and eventually OpenCL, the decline of Cell, and no more need for Other OS.
Not to mention the simple, inescapable thermodynamic certainty that a machine that is consuming less electrical power will produce less heat.
My wife's hairdryer consumes less electrical power than a 360 and still runs hotter. ;)
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
For what platform should an indie developer make a local-multiplayer video game?
Phone
Perhaps I wasn't clear. By "local multiplayer" I was referring to a scenario like fighting games, Bomberman series, and Mario Party series, which let multiple players connect gamepads to a single machine displaying a single view of all characters on a single TV-size monitor. Handhelds require one machine for each player, as do most native PC games, which assume a LAN or Internet play environment. A machine for each player is ideal for FPS and RTS but not for, say, fighting games.
That is of course assuming you don't want to make a PC game for whatever reason.
A PC with a suitably large monitor is called a home theater PC (HTPC). Though a PC easily supports four Xbox 360-style gamepads through a USB hub, some other Slashdot users seem to think there aren't enough HTPCs to support a market for HTPC-specific games. Someone else recommended making a feature-complete prototype for HTPC, not trying to sell it, and then trying to negotiate with every publisher that has released a console game in the same genre in the past couple years in hope of getting an offer to work on a console port of the game that will actually get sold.
I've had the Xenon (original), a Falcon (replacement for the Xenon when it RROD'd) and a Jasper based xbox. Each was successively quieter, cooler and drew less power.
But why did they do the Slim comparison with the 2+ year old Falcon platform and not the current Jasper? I find the Jasper to be almost imperceptibly quiet and my power testing puts it very close to the ~100 watts that this article shows the Slim pulling.
Given the price drops, I think you're better off buying a Jasper based Arcade for $100 at current sale pricing, and following one of the many available guides for hacking your own 250gb drive. I made a 250gb drive from a $45 western digital drive, the case from a broken microsoft 20gb hard drive, and about 10 minutes of my time hooking the drive up to a pc and writing a new bit of firmware to the drive.
250GB Jasper based system for ~$150. Why pay more.
As far as people who've had problems with scratched disks and others who havent, there have been a half dozen dvd drives used in the xbox. Some models had no protection to hold the disk in place, some used a piece of material stuck in place that would prevent a disk from hopping out of the tray if you moved the system, and some had a tray that actually prevented the disk from moving. So its natural that some people have had problems and others havent...the latter simply had a different model of the xbox.
It removes the LED from the from so RROD is not possible, (it has to be called something else like a E74 error).
It still scratches discs.
New Xbox, same old crap for piss-poor American design and low-budget manufacturing.
Microsoft is a true innovator in the field of error communication, first the BSOD, then RROD, now GROD?
The only thing I can think of that comes close to their market penetration is the 404.
Not exactly, there are a lot of ways a device could consume less electricity yet produce more heat. It might waste less energy as sound yet waste more as heat.
On my boathouse, if the swell hits me broadsided then it could cause discs to skip if ever they were playing. I've hosted much of my electronics equipment on hoists with dampers just to mediate between the shift of gravity and it's only helped with the gradual shifts.
BTW, this is a big Deep-V boathouse, not a square or flat Houseboat. Please be distracted from the size of my penis. :-)
No red ring == no red ring of death!
We just get a green dot of death now, but RROD is FIXED! Long live GDOD!
Are you sure about that? Hairdryers consume a LOT of power, take a look at the meter when you're using the dryer since you'll see it speed up massively. I doubt the 360 draws as much even in its old incarnation.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.