Microsoft’s Xbox One is out in the wild and iFixit took it upon themselves to buy one and strip it down completely – for science!
The console eventually comes down to 23 components, including the motherboard, heatsink and fan, along with twelve screws and a couple of wires. The only difficult part of the disassembly was figuring how to get in – it was quickly revealed that the disassembly starts by prising off the left-hand grille and then snapping off the top compartment.
A few surprises were discovered in the teardown. One was that Microsoft elected to use a WiFi module that also supported Bluetooth 4.0 protocols, Near-Field Communication (NFC) and 802.11ac wireless network support. This means that most of the functionality of the One, at least where networking and device compatibility are concerned, will only come later through patches to the system.
The reason why the One is big is because Microsoft also chose to use a standard SATA Blu-Ray drive from Lite-On and used the extra space provided by the DVD drive to add in a bigger heatsink and fan. The fan vents hot air out through the top of the chassis, so don’t go putting anything else on top of the One.
Xbox One main motherboard
The motherboard also revealed some interesting details. The orange-circled chips are memory modules made by Hynix, the blue-circled chip is a voltage regulator module, the pink-circled chip is the Ethernet controller and the black-circled chip is a voltage controller that steps up the current from 3v to 20v.
The yellow-circled one is a low-power integrated ARM processor that will handle all duties like downloading and applying updates in low-power mode. The green-circled chip is 8GB of flash memory, likely used for the game video capturing. This means that Microsoft is limited to 720p video streams because that is very likely the limit of their ARM processor that does this on the fly.
Using the flash memory is a welcome relief, as myself and many others wondered if Microsoft would cache the video captures to the hard drive instead of something a little faster. The PS4 uses a similar setup for its background tasks, but uses 256MB of DDR3 memory instead.
Overall, the Xbox One is remarkably easy to take apart and can be done with a basic toolkit consisting of flat-head screwdrivers, a T9 Torx screwdriver, and some patience.
The only unknown at this point is if the hard drive is really replaceable. iFixit found that Microsoft reserves around 100GB of the drive for themselves, with around 390GB of space available on first boot to the user. That space diminishes with time, requiring you to purchase an external drive compatible with the Xbox One if you start to run up against your drive’s limits.
iFixit rated the console an 8/10 for repairability, saying that most users shouldn’t have a problem making repairs to their console when it’s out of warranty.
Source: iFixit.com
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