The new $450 Xbox Series X is a big, white brick. It’s very brick-like, so there’s no slot for the last remaining game disc. But don’t think of this redesign in the same way as Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro. Like Sony’s thin PS5, it’s not small in stature and doesn’t have a disk drive. Inside, it’s a different story. A teardown video shows that Microsoft’s gaming division has completely redesigned the essence of the Series X for 2024. Nevertheless, this slightly cheaper console doesn’t seem to be what the redesigned Xbox needs.
Starting Tuesday, there will be two new Xbox Series X versions and a Series S with more storage capacity. There’s the $600 Galaxy Black Edition Series X with a glossy exterior and 2TB of SSD storage. Finally, the Robot White 1 TB Digital Edition costs $50 more than the base model’s MSRP (although the Series X and controller currently cost $480 on Amazon) and lacks a disk drive. This is the version of Microsoft’s console that’s supposed to attract potential or current Game Pass subscribers.
Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of confusion about disk drives. The $700 PlayStation 5 Pro ships unboxed, so you’ll have to pay an additional $80 to play the disc. How does Xbox fit into that discussion?The all-white, seamless Digital Edition console has an otherworldly aesthetic. It’s either an alien device or an oversized child’s building block. It also doesn’t look like a toaster, especially if the Xbox Series S is present.
YouTuber Austin Evans weighed and disassembled both the Xbox Series X Galaxy Black and Robot White. Despite having more storage than before, the 2 TB version weighs 0.38 pounds less. If you don’t have a disk drive, the white version weighs 1 pound less.
Is that really that important for a gaming console that’s going to sit on a TV stand for the rest of its life? No, it doesn’t. If you look inside the version without the new disk drive, you’ll see that Xbox has deleted the drive and left it as empty space. Evans said it’s also not possible to physically integrate new disk drives into the Digital Edition, as there are no connections to power the newly redesigned internals.
The most dramatic and potentially impactful changes all concern the CPU and cooling. Xbox reconfigured the motherboard to support a new 6nm SOC that is smaller than the original CPU. The new console features a completely reconfigured heatsink. The new Series X uses heat pipes, while the 2020 version uses a larger vapor chamber. This cooling device is much better than any heat pipe solution, but it is also more expensive. Evans reasoned that the smaller the chip, the less voltage it would need to reach today’s clock speeds, and the cheaper the cooling system needed.
Xbox isn’t alone If you want to avoid vapor chambers. The PlayStation 5 has used heat pipes through several internal redesigns since its launch in 2020. As Evans noted in a previous teardown, Sony took similar steps with the pre-slim PS5, reducing chip size and size. Shrink the heatsink without lowering the price.
According to Evans’ tests, the new version runs on average about 11W less power than the original console during menus and in-game. It didn’t put out any more heat than the original, and it wasn’t any louder (i.e. no more than a whisper).
The engineering that went into redesigning the new Xbox is significant, but it makes no real difference to consumers. It won’t save you a lot of money on your monthly electricity bill. Given all the new consoles and internals, especially if Microsoft is spending less on cooling than before, it would be nice if they could cut down on more storage, or at least compete on price. It will be reassuring. That way you’ll have a better argument for purchasing. For now, it’s better to think of these consoles as being exactly the same as before, or, in the case of big white bricks, more limited.
