Josh Hendrickson
Well, it’s that time again—the next generation of gaming consoles are upon us, so our friends over at iFixit were kind enough to get their hands on one and tear it to pieces. This time the Xbox Series X is up, and there are some small surprises to be had, along with a giant heatsink.
Have you ever taken apart an Xbox One? Well, good news; this is pretty similar totally different. That much is probably obvious considering the Xbox One resembles a budget VCR, and the Xbox Series X looks like the world’s most boring bread box. Emphasis on the box.
But that size isn’t a total waste, according to iFixit. It seems Microsoft’s chief concern was keeping the monster of a gaming console cool. The company used tricks like folding board components around an aluminum block to dissipate heat.
That’s not all, of course. During disassembly, the teardown wizards discovered a colossal heatsink and a giant fan to boot. Microsoft took other steps as well to minimize the machine’s noise, including securing all the components with conveniently labeled rubber straps. Those should keep vibrations in check. In theory at least.
None of that is a total surprise. The Xbox Series X is all about power, and the heart of the thing is a custom AMD custom 8-core Zen 2 CPU that’s bound to generate enormous heat.
In other interesting tidbits, Microsoft stuck with the same disc drive the Xbox One S and Xbox One X use, complete with a necessary circuit board to pair it to the device. That means if you want to replace it, you’ll have to do some soldering—sad times.
And more surprisingly, the hard drive is user-replaceable—in theory. You still have to tear apart your console, of course, and it’s possible you’ll have to go through a ton of effort with command line and scripts to format the new drive correctly. But unlike the PS5, the hard drive is not soldered to the motherboard.
Right now, it’s unlikely you’d want to replace the hard drive anyway. The Xbox Series X already has a 1 TB m.2 2230 NVMe SSD. If all those numbers mean gibberish to you, just know that you can’t get much faster than that right now, nor can you go much larger. Not for “you aren’t Bill Gates” kind of money anyway.
But what if you want to try anyway? Well, it sounds doable—the iFixit team gave the Xbox Series X a reparability score of seven out of ten. You’ll want a Mako driver kit to get past the Torx screws, but a lot of the inner parts are modular once you get to them. But while some components, like the hard drive, can be physically replaced it’s possible you’ll still need additional difficult software work. Hence the imperfect score. But don’t take our word for it; go check out the pretty pictures and the full teardown at the iFixit site.
Source: iFixit
