The freshly announced Xbox One X is the most powerful console ever created. Incredibly, it’s also the smallest Xbox ever created.
During today’s announcement at E3, Microsoft showed off a huge number of games in glorious 4K at a consistent 60 frames per second.
That’s insanely impressive for a console, particularly one so bloody small. With all that power in such a small space, the team of Xbox engineers had to think differently about how to keep it all cool.
You see, when electronics run, they get hot. When they run ridiculously labour-intensive software, like, say, a video game at true 4K, they can get even hotter, which will either set your shit on fire or burn out the hardware.
For bloody yonks, consoles have used heat sinks and the sort of fans that you’d see in a PC, but that just wasn’t going to cut it for Xbox, so the team implemented a liquid-cooled vapour chamber in addition to other methods of cooling.
Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Xbox and Windows gaming platform, Mike Ybarra, told PEDESTRIAN.TV that sound, along with the size of the design, were both factors in this innovation.
“Acoustics are always important as well, so as you shrink, you gotta have somewhere for that heat to go,” he said. “So we had to really look and say ‘how can we innovate in our cooling system and that design and not have acoustics be so loud?’”
It’s certainly not new technology, but it is the first time it’s been used in a gaming console. Ybarra says much of the inspiration actually came from the business world.
“Being the gatekeepers of Windows as well, we’ve worked with the server business a lot. We look at those technologies which are usually a few years ahead of consumer technology [and] from everything we say ‘what can we pull in and how do we take advantage of that?’”
I, for one, can’t wait to get my hands on this extremely beefy piece of hardware.
Xbox One X will be released worldwide on November 7 and will set you back $649 bones.
Photo: Microsoft.
