Microsoft is revealing the full specs for its Xbox Series X console today, and it includes support for removable storage and much faster load times for games. The software giant will be using a custom AMD Zen 2 CPU with eight cores clocked at 3.8GHz each, a custom AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 12 teraflops and 52 compute units clocked at 1.825GHz each. This is all based on a 7nm process and includes 16GB of GDDR6 RAM with a 1TB custom NVME SSD storage drive.
Microsoft is using two mainboards on this Xbox Series X compact design, and the entire unit is cooled through air being pulled in from the bottom and pushed out at the top via a 130mm fan.
That’s some serious firepower, but the Xbox One series didn’t lack power either, yet lost the market share battle to the PS4 without putting up much of a fight. Firepower means nothing without the games to back it up, and that’s where the Xbox One simply failed to deliver. Show us the games, because without those, all this hardware is useless.
That being said, I’ve always had a soft sport for chimney-like computer designs since the PowerMac G4 Cube, and this fits right in there. Perhaps not the most practical design, but it sure does stand out.
The Xbox subscription (gamepass) might be the main deal. I have both consoles, and use PS4 for exclusives, or games I got on monthly plus list. However I prefer the Xbox One X for multi-platforms.
Having a larger (and arguably better) free game library, along with objectively better hardware (X vs Pro), makes it the ideal machine for multi-platforms (or the occasional Xbox exclusive). They still lack the God of War or Spiderman caliber action, but what currently exists cause me to spend more time on that platform.
The next-gen brings several new things (nvme, ray tracing, maybe real 4K), but none of them matter as much as the content. For a “dad” gamer, I don’t worry about getting things on launch time (I had several things pre-ordered stay in shrink wrap for months). What I need is accessing a large enough library of high quality content. If they can keep the gamepass rolling, I would probably get the next-gen Xbox too (one or two years after the launch).
Unlike previous PlayStations, the PS4 doesn’t really have a soul. It’s just another piece of hardware from PC parts – same as Xbox.
Yes, it has some good exclusives, and so I will play those. But otherwise, I prefer the Xbox. It’s not just the Game Pass (although that helps). The two key things that pull me towards Xbox is that it is much quieter in operation, and the controller is more comfortable to use.
What nonsense… it either has good games or it doesn’t period.
If anything the uniqueness of many past consoles has prevented them from having as many good games because they were harder to program for.
I would not go so far, but yes PS4 does not have the same appeal as the PS3. Back in the day, I got one just to play Metal Gear Solid 4. But I bought the PS4 because it was on a good discount.
And, I agree it is loud too. I can easily hear the PS4 inside the cabinet.
sukru,
Does the cabinet have any ventilation? Not that I know much about PS4 fan noise, but if the temperatures in the cabinet going up faster than your room temperature then you’re probably higher on the fan curve. This is one advantage for big PC towers, they’re able to dissipate more heat with less noise. It looks like a lot of work, but I see some PS4 water cooling conversions on youtube, haha.
I’m intrigued by passively cooled PCs, although most of them are focus just on CPU cooling and I’m pretty sure many of the ones we see will throttle under enough load.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bhLZL3YRS4
I’d like to see a concept PC that shows what it would take to have fully passive performance PC (CPU & GPU & motherboard & components) running at full tilt with decent thermals. I’m picturing something with a lot of metal and external fins.
There are passive cooled cases (the entire case is a heatsink):
https://hdplex.com/
But these tend to be expensive. According to their web specs, they can dissipate 400W of heat, which is quite impressive (it is as much as a small portable heater).
I have my older PC with a (relatively) silent air cooling fan (same brand with the ones in your video, but has a very large fan attached). I think Xbox One X has a similar cooling solution. In fact I have that in the same cabinet, which makes much less noise.
I believe Sony had dropped the ball here. Thermals are a very important part of keeping the system fast, stable, and not break quickly. Hope the PS5 would be better.
(Btw, the cabinet has an open back, it is not the ideal solution, but worked so far).
sukru,
I’ve never seen one of these, very neat. I see them mention using a 400W power supply but in two places it says “support max 95W TDP CPU”.
They’ve got an extra addon for passively cooling the GPU, but support seems to be limited to older cards.
https://hdplex.com/hdplex-passive-video-card-gpu-heatsink-system-for-hdplex-h5.html
It would be interesting to see them do something like this for a really high end system just to see would be possible given enough money, but nevertheless this is a good find, thanks for linking it!
My PC fans are not overly noisy, but it’d be nicer if they didn’t make as much noise considering it’s out in the open. I did not go out of my way to build something quite, but I’ve spent some time trying to scale back the fan activity. I did face an issue in that my gigabyte motherboard uses a superio chip that doesn’t work under linux. I can neither detect the temperatures, nor control the fan speeds after the bios is booted…it’s not that big a deal and I’ve had good experiences with older gigabyte motherboards in the past which is why I stuck with them, but had I known about this specific problem I would have bought something else.
Incidentally if anyone can recommend a great fan controller for linux, let me know 🙂
Yes I know! It’s pointless having high speed & high core CPUs or GPUs if they have to throttle (looking at you MBP).
“Xbox One series didn’t lack power either,”
It definitely did lack firepower. The PS4 had around 30% more GPU, and cost less at launch. And in the early days of the Xbox One the graphics drivers were a mess so the power deficit was made even worse. Lots of bad press about performance. Titanfall was a big early release for the Xbox One yet the Xbox 360 version had slightly better frame rates. Things improved but many games ran at 1080p on PS4 and less on the Xbox One.
The One X was powerful of course (more so than the PS4 Pro), but the damage was done from the botched launch and, as you say, the lack of games.
Neither console, however, could be seen as “outdated” today. Both are still more than capable of fantastic graphics in AAA games.
The improvements in games that this generation will offer will be nowhere near as obvious as the PS2>PS3 or PS3>PS4 jumps were. For the most part, i can see Sony and Microsoft struggling to sell their next gen consoles.
Yes I definitely agree. Some users aren’t even asking for another generation at this point.
I felt like the PS3/360 gen was a sweet spot in terms of the balance between gameplay, realism, and game development time/cost. In the current gen it has got very expensive to built gameplay environments and quite a few games got hung up on that and forgot about actual gameplay.
The123king,
Not much of a gamer myself, but I agree as well. That’s the problem with progress, the better the tech gets, the less dramatic the improvements in experience. I remember when upgrading a PC would double the performance and open up a world of new opportunities. Now days, we’ve got some features like partial realtime raytracing and maybe in the future we’ll actually get “hollywood” quality” real time raytracing, but frankly outside of scenes specifically set up to display the new effects, it already feels subtle and if you aren’t specifically looking for them you probably won’t even notice further improvements.
I don’t think we will see massive improvements out of the gate, but there are a couple features of the new consoles that will make stark differences, 1 about 5-10x more CPU performance, 2 the ability to stream textures from SSD, ray tracing which isn’t possible on current gen for both lighting and audio and likely in some games for reflections as well (yeah AMD has raytraced audio tech so sounds will bounce off of things like you would expect).
cb88,
We’ll see how it plays out of course, but my prediction is that CPUs will continue to take the back seat and the industry will continue to gravitate to faster GPGPU technology.
Well, I do expect to see a huge boost over predecessors simply because the predecessors had such low specs. The XBox One only had an SATA2 hard drive and a 5400RPM one at that.
https://www.reneelab.com/how-to-add-ssd-for-xbox-one.html
https://withinrafael.com/2016/12/12/notes-on-swapping-the-internal-xbox-one-hard-disk-for-a-solid-state-disk/
An NVME drive with it’s own PCI lanes will absolutely blow it out of the water…and yet even an NVME drive is still slower than system RAM. So even if memory mapping directly from the SSD is possible, I’m skeptical that this arrangement actually provides much benefit over loading textures into ram as needed and using them this way.
Obviously I’m as interested as anyone to see what comes of this, but clearly most of the gain is going to come from upgrading to NVME for storage. Games will benefit from virtually instant loads.
Having experienced the realtime raytracing, IMHO it’s neat but not really a game changer. Unless you have a particularly reflective environment, it can be quite subtle especially if your in a fast paced and don’t take the time to look closely at the pixels. I mentioned this before, but maybe a raytraced racing game would change my mind 🙂
There’s no denying it can increase fidelity, clearly it does, however I agree with The123king that the improvements are getting more marginal than in the past.
@Thom: Re show me the games.
Just wait. Seriously. With XboxOne(s) .. XboxOne-X came out and everyone said “There is nothing to use it! Waaaaaaaah!” .. well, lots of games suddengly got insane updates. Take Halo-MCE for instance. If you’re install is set to receive 4k updates (and not the additional Reach update) and you have a system and TV capable of 4k, stick that in a Scorpio (1-X) and watch it drag down over 120gb of additional textures and other 4k enhancements in addition to what gets installed off BlueRay. Patience sunshine, it’ll happen. New titles will come out also 🙂 (new Halo later this year if I’m not wrong).I quite like that a lot of my older games are suddenly getting 4k treatment for zip.
New hardware looks good. Hope it has the DVD drive or external. Like the idea of NVME update cards. I don’t much care about the looks, and do think it’s a bit ugly. I’m about the functionality though. 🙂 Xbox hasn’t yet disapointed me and I’ve had them since the beginning.
Provided you can homebrew on it (using Unreal Engine or Unity), that’s ok for me. Otherwise no use.