With game consoles and gaming PCs, heat is always a major concern. The limiting factor to high-end performance is often how hot the device can get before it starts to suffer from heat-related issues as all those little semi-conducting transistors start to break down. That’s why overclocking your GPU can be so dangerous, and why people resort to liquid nitrogen cooling to boost their Doom Eternal frame rates over 1000 fps.
For consoles, heat is still an issue that engineers spend a lot of time trying to figure out. All consoles, like PCs, will generate heat when under heavy load, and that heat needs to get away from the delicate electronic bits in order for the console to continue to function at peak performance.
Microsoft’s solution was to turn the Xbox Series X into a sort of chimney shape with a big fan at the top. That fan apparently does its job extremely well and is whisper quiet, but the console itself is still putting out a lot of heat.
So much heat that folks lucky enough to get a preview version of the console are reporting that the Xbox Series X is hot. Really hot. Like, “keep your apartment warm in the winter” kinda hot.
French games site Jeux Video recently got their Xbox Series X and noted that the console was “really hot.”
“It doesn’t make any noise, but damn it’s hot” noted reviewer Ken Bogard (with translation from VGC). “The console is emitting heat like crazy. It’s almost like a fireplace shaft. You can heat up your flat with it.”
Bogard’s sentiments were mirrored by Giant Beastcast co-host and CNET staffer Jeff Bakalar. He noted that even when his pre-release Xbox Series X was doing nothing at all, it was still putting out a tremendous amount of heat.
“Here’s what’s crazy… this was just plugged-in in standby mode behind me and you guys, the entire thing is a little toasty,” he said. “It seems like in the way like a lot of the other consoles were doing stuff while you were not using them, it seems like this thing might be doing something while you’re not using it, to the point where it needs to exhaust heat.”
For those who live in northern climes, a little extra heat will be welcome for the summer months, but hot Xbox near the equator isn’t likely to make Microsoft many friends.
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