We are in possession of a working Xbox Series X

It's a busy week for all things Xbox. On Monday, Microsoft confirmed its acquisition of the Bethesda and ZeniMax game-dev family to fuel the Xbox ecosystem going forward. On Tuesday, the company launched preorders for this November's Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

And today, Microsoft topped all of that off by shipping us a "non-final" Series X of our own-and I have immediately begun testing it.

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  The "non-final" Xbox Series X, photographed before we powered it on. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]

As the above gallery shows, Ars Technica received a package from Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, containing a "non-final" Xbox Series X console, the brand-new Xbox gamepad, and a 1TB "storage expansion" card, as built to the Xbox Velocity Architecture spec and made by Seagate. Nothing else came in this box (besides an HDMI 2.1 cable and a power cord, anyway).

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