Xbox Series X teardown dives into the console’s unique design

While we haven't yet seen the version of the PlayStation 5 Sony will be peddling this fall, Microsoft has been anything but shy with its upcoming console. Unless Sony one-ups Redmond, the new Xbox immediately raised eyebrows when Microsoft showed it off at the Game Awards. It's one of the weirdest looking game consoles since the Nintendo GameCube. Now, Microsoft has offered up a deep-dive into the system's internals via Digital Foundry to show off just why it looks like it does.

The idea behind the Xbox Series X, believe it or not, isn't to look weird in the living room. Consoles from the PlayStation 2 onward have worked hard to obey the general dimensions and proportions of a media player. Even the Nintendo Wii was a skinny piece of hardware meant to lay flat or vertical and hide in your entertainment center. The Xbox Series X is, well, a box.

Performance and Airflow are King

As Digital Foundry's Richard Ledbetter goes through each element of the design in this teardown, it becomes more and more clear that the Xbox Series X is designed in service of its performance rather than vice versa. The Xbox team put down to hard specs early in development. The system has to offer twice as much compute power as the Xbox One X-12 teraflops versus 6 in the One X-but must equal the One X in acoustic performance. In other words, no jet engines allowed.

And so the system is built with a unique design that splits things into a main System-on-a-Chip (SOC) board and a southbridge board mounted to a cast-aluminum block. All of the hottest hardware hides beneath a massive heatsink that consists of a copper baseplate and a huge but lightweight aluminum structure surrounding a vapor chamber.

The focus on heat dissipation even influences the design of the storage expansion cards and how they plug into the system. Something Microsoft calls thermal bias springs push the metal body of the expansion card against the body of the console so that it, too, can benefit from heat dissipation. NVMe SSDs are some of the more heat-sensitive aspects of any PC, so it's good to see Microsoft paying attention to that.

All of this hardware requires a 350-watt power supply. Digital Foundry notes that this is pretty high for a console, putting it between the 245-watt consumption of the Xbox One X and the sky-high 399 watts required by the original PlayStation 3.

70 percent more airflow

A single 130-mm fan at the top of the system cools all of this by pulling air up and out of the console. The fan is a custom design, from the shape and number of blades to the curvature of the fan body (and the Master Chief emblem emblazoned on the side of the fan where most of us will never see it).

The design allows for 70% more airflow compared to the previous generation of Xbox consoles and 20% more airflow through the heatsink itself. Presumably, Ledbetter is talking about the One X here as he has been throughout the video, but he doesn't say for certain.

The power and airflow needs of the system helped dictate the design, and the layout of the components dictate the dimensions. The Ultra HD Blu-ray drive decided the depth of the system; the heatsink determined the width. The final height, meanwhile, facilitates the massive fan sitting atop all this hardware.

And while Microsoft seems to be focusing on the system as a vertical one, the video does pause to show the system laying horizontally, so it should work either way.

The Xbox Series X Controller

Microsoft talked a bit about the controller, too. At first blush, it seems very similar to the Xbox One controller. In many ways it is. It keeps the same basic design to allow for easy backward and forward compatibility. Elite Series 2 controllers will work with the system, while Series X controllers will work with an Xbox One. The whole controller is slightly smaller, though, to allow a much wider range of hands to comfortably fit the contours. One thing Microsoft did that I wish I could experience in person is print out up-sized versions of the Xbox One and Series X controllers. These cartoonishly huge controllers show how it feels to be a kid or smaller person using one of these controllers. The end result is a pair of controllers that would even make the Duke controller blush.

Inside the controller is a new low-power Bluetooth radio to help keep latency and power use low. Both the Xbox Series X and Xbox One are also getting new software stacks that lower the software parts of controller latency. This is the Display Latency Input or DLI that Microsoft has been talking about. DF calls the new digital pad a notable improvement. The controller is identical in other ways, though, using AA batteries for power and same-height thumbsticks as the current controller.

This teardown does a good job of showing how Microsoft put the Xbox Series X together, and I'm hoping to see the same from Sony. These are ultra-engineered consoles that seem to get closer than ever before to the power of current high-end PCs, and it's fascinating to see how the systems differ from the ones we're building at home.

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