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The Xbox 360 is one of the most important products for Microsoft this year and it has your living room squarely in its sights. It has even been described as the second coming of Sega's Dreamcast! This new Xbox is smaller than the original and its wireless features, along with its stylishly concave shape, make it fit nicely into the living room, a very welcome change from the standard X Box. In fact, it’s about 20% smaller than the original and the console can either rest on its end or on its side. The sides are “sucked in” and the power button is oversized and surrounded by a ring of glowing green light. Finally, the color of the console is a soft white, compared to the harsh black color of the original that really made it stand out.
As far as the technology the X Box incorporates, all of its hardware is custom-made from the ground up. It also features a custom graphics chip designed by NVIDIA, which is not entirely dissimilar to the GeForce 3. This graphics chip is the most powerful of any other game console. As you may know, graphics-intense applications such as video games are in fact mathematically-intense applications so the graphics chip of a game console can perform is of crucial importance to the gaming performance it can deliver. In fact, the whole purpose of graphics chips is to aid in the mathematical computations so if for example a circle needs to be drawn, the processor passes the circle’s center and radius to the graphics chip and the graphics chip does all the computations, rather than have the processor create the circle’s surface pixel by pixel. What the X Box does is delivering PC-le
vel processing power to your living room. Far more than a game console, the X Box 360 is in fact, a total media center.
So how exactly is that PC-level power integrated in what looks like a game console? Well, first of all, it uses MTEC technology to liquid cool the hardware, so as to avoid noisy fans. CoolIT, the vendor of X Box 360 cooling system claims it’s a unique solution that gives more stable performance and better temperatures. The X Box also has a built-in hard drive used to save games and download goodies off of Xbox Live. As you might have guessed, it also features an Ethernet connection port which gives it built-in broadband capability. It also supports wireless connectivity for up to 4 different controllers. The controllers can actually act as full remote controls and turn the X Box on and off. Apart from that, the device also has three USB ports and three memory slots, with memory units starting at 64MB.
As far as what games you can play on the X Box 360, Electronic Arts announced the largest commitment in its history to Xbox 360. Other key industry publishers announced that there are more than 160 X Box 360 games already in development! These new X Box 360 games, Microsoft says, will be making better use of the X Box 360’s advanced video and audio capabilities. It also seems that while PS3 games will be at around $80, X Box 360 games are at around $50! Currently, most X Box 360 games are ports from the standard xbox and don’t fully utilize the console’s advanced capabilities. Even the first crop of X Box 360 games is expected not to take full advantage of some of X Box 360’s features.
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