Xbox Hardware

First Impressions

Everyone likes to make fun of the Xbox's size, and indeed, the system is very large in comparison to the Playstation2 and Dreamcast. The footprint is actually the size of a standard full-featured ATX motherboard with on-board IDE-RAID. This isn't bad considering the HD, DVD-ROM, and internal power supply but it is larger and heavier than its peers. The retail XBox will ship with a standard RCA (Video/Left/Right) connector and power cord. We attached the AV cable to the TV, plugged in the two-prong power cable, and powered the Xbox on. Two words immediately came to mind: quiet and sharp.

The Silent PC

The Xbox would certainly qualify as a "silent PC." Although there is an exhaust fan, it is very quiet, along the lines of the PlayStation2 as opposed to the Dreamcast. There is a slight whir of the hard drive and that is it. In our technical overview, we questioned the decision to go with a now confirmed 128KB L2 Pentium III CPU instead of the AMD Athlon. While we would still agree that the Athlon's greater bandwidth would be a technically sound design choice, it's possible that Microsoft was concerned about the heat dissipation. When the Xbox CPU design was awarded to Intel, AMD was still on the Slot-A Athlons, and the even hotter aluminum interconnect Thunderbird was what AMD had around the corner.

Exceptional Image Quality

During the inspired boot sequence, we were stunned by the fidelity of the image on the TV. We are NOT talking about anything along the lines of 3D features such as anti-aliasing, or advanced texture blending. Instead we are simply impressed by the raw analog image quality itself.

Just as Matrox has built a reputation in the PC industry as having ultra-sharp 2D text, we think the Xbox will develop a status as having one of the sharpest outputs in a console. The Xbox produced a very clean image and it was as if the machine was operating somewhere closer to the theoretical bandwidth limit of the cables. Even with the standard composite video connection, colors seemed to have more punch and contrast than those of previous consoles, and borders between colors were well defined with minimal but expected dot crawl - even simple copyright text looked exceptional.

Bootup animation logo	Control Panel	Custom Track Mixes
HDD Memory Block Management	Console Preferences	Music Management

In a way, the high quality output makes the picture look higher-resolution than it really is. This will obviously be a key selling point as most people still use standard composite connections instead of the higher quality S-VHS, or Component outputs. The difference in quality is obvious to the trained eye, and would be evident to even a novice who had a chance to look at two consoles side by side. Admittedly, we're not sure if the top-notch image quality was due to a lucky "golden sample" XDK and we haven't tried the Playstation 2 with exotic Monster Cables. All we know is that our XDK provided superior image quality, and this was later quantified when we captured our videos. We were able to compress our videos to a much lower bitrate while maintaining good image quality.