So you’ve been sitting back afraid to buy an Xbox 360 because of high failure rates of the current systems. You’ve heard of the 65nm chips, new HDMI systems and the promise of a more reliable Xbox 360 coming sometime later this year. So you figure this fall may be the time to pounce...
You figured wrong.
While it is true, the new 65nm Xbox 360’s sporting the new Falcon system boards are on the boats right now from China, Falcon apparently isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. First of all, the Falcon boards will make an appearance in the Elite and the Halo 3 Limited Edition Xbox 360’s. Falcon hardware will replace the current Zephyr hardware in the Premium and possibly the Core once the older Zephyr units are out of the supply chain and happily installed in your houses. This is according to Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft’s GM of the Xbox 360 group.
So if you were waiting for the 65nm technology, it looks like you’re going to want to shop for the Halo 3 or Elite units this fall, not the Core or Premium SKUs. However, the initial Falcon boards will only be equipped with the 65nm processors, the ATI Graphics GPU will remain 90nm technology. Yes you read that right, the promise of Falcon is only half as good as it was suppose to be.
We find this to be quite shocking and reason not to jump on new Falcon bases systems this fall. Although there are many reasons for the Xbox 360 to fail, the GPU has been called out as the source of a lot of the problem. It’s crammed under the DVD drive which limits the amount of space to vent off the heat it generates. The heat sink is not adequate for cooling and the fan positioning is also inadequate. Microsoft engineers have tried to remedy the problem by installing a copper tube and an auxiliary heat sink in a more open area in front of the CPU heat sinks. This modification started to appear in systems manufactured sometime after April 07 and we would expect it to be a mandatory component in all Falcon systems in like of the GPU not shrinking.
The only reason we can really come up with for prioritizing the downsizing the CPU’s over the GPU is that there’s more of them, so the cost savings is more significant to Microsoft. The problem is that the GPU is the source of many problems so from a consumer standpoint, it would have been better for us and made a more significant impact on system reliability if the GPU had have been shrunk to 65nm first or at the same time as the CPUs.
Given that we started hearing about Flacon a year ago, it’s pretty disappointing to learn that it still isn’t 100 percent ready to go. One can only speculate as to why ATI hasn’t gotten the 65nm GPU ready for prime time. If you just can’t wait to get an Xbox 360 though with Halo 3 coming in less than a month, you’re going to want to pickup the Halo 3 Edition, those ones will no doubt be among the first with Falcon.
