Xbox Series S teardown: inside Microsoft's smallest ever console
Sometimes experimenting with consoles in a non-warranty-friendly manner can go horribly wrong, so consider this piece as a kind of final farewell to my now-deceased Xbox Series S. To be clear, its demise is entirely down to my own ill-advised tinkering and the machine performed well from the day I got it, but at least possessing a dead console opens up the opportunity to examine the internals of Microsoft’s junior Xbox in a way we’ve not been able to before. Pre-launch, I loved the console’s form-factor and having now stripped it down to its barebones, I’m even more impressed with the quality of the design. It’s a genuine engineering marvel.
To be clear, my overall opinion of the console and its performance has not changed – Series S works but there’s still the sense that the cutbacks to spec were a little severe. Specifically, I still think it should have shipped with more memory and a wider interface for more bandwidth. However, having disassembled Series S, the quality of the design and the construction is simply excellent. If a PC manufacturer had put together an ultra-small form factor unit like this, packing this much performance into this small a box, the reviews would be stellar. The idea that Microsoft is shipping this at $299/£249 is remarkable.
In terms of the power to size ratio, the closest equivalent I can envisage in the PC space is Intel’s Hades Canyon NUC, which shipped with a Core i7 8809G – a bizarre fusion of a quad-core Intel chip fused with a custom AMD Vega GPU. Xbox Series S is more modern, has better cooling, dramatically superior acoustics, and possesses far superior CPU and graphics performance. This is down to all core functions working from a single piece of silicon, a simplified memory set-up and an excellent cooling solution.
The video on this page speaks for itself in terms of how easy Series S is to access. Plastic stickers on the rear of the unit are peeled back to reveal two screws. Grab a Torx 8 screwdriver (no other tool is needed) and it’s simplicity itself to strip down the system to the mainboard. During the journey, you’ll note an almost plug-and-play design that allows for key modules to be taken out and re-inserted with the minimum of fuss. Removing the mainboard completely reveals that the NVMe drive is attached to the rear of the system. If it were possible to format the SSD correctly (and if the drives were readily available!) a user upgrade would be simplicity itself.
