Xbox One Teardown as Console Arrives in New Zealand
Let's take a peek inside the Xbox One!
We've already seen the inside of the PS4 and now iFixit is rounding out the console war with a full teardown of Microsoft's brand new Xbox One. Though the console hasn't launched yet, the Xbox One is already on sale in New Zealand due to time differences. The ever committed iFixit crew flew to New Zealand to get their hands on one of the first consoles sold and performed a teardown ahead of the console's release.
The good news is that it’s reasonably easy to repair your Xbox One console. The device scored an impressive 8/10 on iFixit's repairability scale. The iFixit crew reports that the fan and heat sink is easy to replace and, while the console doesn’t have the same user-replaceable hard drive as the PS4, the hard drive is a standard 2.5-inch 500 GB 5400 RPM HDD. Replacing it will void your warranty, but it’s doable.
Other finds include SK Hynix SDRAM, an ON Semiconductor integrated power control IC, a Realtek Ethernet controller, a Marvell Avastar WiFi, NFC and Bluetooth chip, and a Texas Instruments high current load switch.
The Xbox One packs an octoa-core x86 processor, 8 GB of RAM, 500 GB of storage and a Blu-ray/DVD drive. It also comes with Microsoft's brand new Kinect 2 sensor as well as a redesigned Xbox controller. Check out what we thought of the Xbox One in our review here.
Head on over to iFixit for the full teardown and the whole gallery of gory photos!
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Yeah should make things pretty straight forward. As long as they don't put hardware checks in place where the firmware has to match (same for the hard drive).
Unless the game loads are ALL sequential ANY SSD will rock the hard drive even at SATA II.
The best a 5400RPM HDD can do if you are lucky is probably 100MB/s. A SATA II SSD will normally push 250-300MB/s easily.
Add in the insanely higher IOPS, it will be much smoother in loading and if its a game that loads while playing, it will be less noticeable.
Even my SATAII RAID0 felt slow compared to my Intel X-25M SATAII SSD.
Console makers always try to skip out on places they shouldn't. It wouldn't even be that much for them, since they buy in bulk.
Meh, faster RPM, more heat, wears out faster. Considering MS's problems with heat last gen, I can sort of understand this move. 5400 vs 7400 RPM is longevity vs performance... I'll usually take longevity myself.
Console makers always try to skip out on places they shouldn't. It wouldn't even be that much for them, since they buy in bulk.
7200 RPM HDD's generally run hotter, consume more power and generally make more noise. Those could be a few factors of why they chose 5400 RPM for the drive.
However, if we forget about the heat dissipation in question since I think that would be their (Microsoft) biggest concern, there really is no reason for them to not put in a 7200 RPM HDD.
Or what stevejnb said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6rOej9Cvgs
Loading, Loading, Loading,...............
Where's an SSD when you need one