Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming: New (quieter, faster) DVD drives in the Xbox 360s

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Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming (Subscribe)

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

New (quieter, faster) DVD drives in the Xbox 360s

IGN.com is running a story about Xbox 360s (at least some of them) manufactured from November of last year onward having new DVD drives.

Older Xbox 360s used Toshiba-Samsung and Hitachi-LG drives -- "the sources of the 360's characteristic whirr" (and a chunk of console's refrigerator-like sound, though the massive dual heat sinks likely share a portion of the blame).

The new DVD drives from BenQ "are significantly quieter and are based upon a Philips design superior to others employed in Xbox 360s."

Though not definitive, the new drives seem to meet two of the primary concerns of gamers:

"Owners of Xbox 360s with the BenQ drive have reported significantly quieter
operation and slightly quicker load times."

So, this is good, and once the stock of old drives is fully exhausted (and fully replaced by the BenQ drives) AND the 65-nanometer CPUs are released in the Xbox 360 (chips are smaller/cooler/cheaper than current 90-nanometer), we're potentially looking at quieter, cheaper, more robust (fixing the overheating sensor, etc.) and/or more feature-rich (a la HDMI or larger hard drives) Xbox 360s.

I know early adopters sign on for some risk, but this appears to be the second iteration of Microsoft making a bad initial decision on DVD-drives for their console (Thompson drives in the original Xbox had a higher failure rate than subsequent Samsung, LG, and Philips drives). It sounds like they learned, and at least started with derivations of a couple the latter (though Thompson actually makes a lot of these drives for these folks, which are then re-branded, even though they're the same drive).

Regardless, the Xbox 360 is improving for new purchasers and "second 360 sickos" (which I may become, depending on the feature sets (if any) of the new Xbox 360s ;-) .

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SOURCES: Gamespot.com, joystiq.com, kotaku.com, Xbox.com, IGN, GameInformer, Official XBox Magazine, CNN, gamesindustry.biz, and others.

Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming (Subscribe)

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

New (quieter, faster) DVD drives in the Xbox 360s

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