Welcome to Valhalla: Inside the New 250GB Xbox 360 Slim
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 18, 2010 1:59 AM ESTThe Motherboard
Two phillips screws hold the fan in place. You don’t need to remove them to remove the heatsink but I did anyway:
The single large heatsink is a lot heftier than what we'd seen in previous 360s, it doesn't feel quite as cheap or as insufficient. This time around it has to do double duty cooling both the CPU and the GPU.
At this point I can easily remove the motherboard and flip it over, revealing our old friend: the x-clamp.
Place your flathead screwdriver tip here, pointing away from the xclamp, and pry the clamp off at this point. Repeat for 1 - 2 more and the whole thing should come off easily.
Unlike previous Xbox 360s, the Valhalla x-clamp isn’t a pain to remove. In fact all I had to do was slide a small flathead screwdriver in each of the four slots in the clamp and push down to make the clamp pop out. I’ve marked the area on the photo above.
With the x-clamp removed the heatsink pulls off revealing Microsoft’s Xbox 360 CGPU covered with a heat spreader. The heat spreader is great for making sure no one cracks a core while working on these things.
The chip to the left of the CGPU is the 360’s South Bridge, responsible for the SATA and USB ports in the system. The chip is marked as an A0 stepping which is usually the first stepping to come back from the fab. This is probably a pretty tried and true design by now with no bugs to worry about at this point.
Xbox 360 South Bridge (top), 16MB SLC NAND (bottom)
The Hynix NAND on the motherboard is still 16MB in size. It is SLC NAND so it should last the lifetime of the Xbox as long as you don’t somehow mod it into a database server.
The third major ASIC on the motherboard is the HANA scaler/video encoder chip we’ve seen before on Jasper.
The motherboard now has two SATA ports directly on the board itself to support the new HDD tray.
I’ve also included a ton of close up shots of various parts of the motherboard in the dissection gallery for our friends at Xbox-Scene.
Have fun!
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Visual - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
does the wifi module work on a PC?does another type of wifi module that was ment for PCs work with the xbox?
are you able to open the hdd case and replace the hdd inside?
Ganesh_balan - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
Anand,Could you please give us an insight into the fan details? Is that a Coolermaster make as it came out in the initial batch of leaked pics from the Chinese website? What size/rpm?
jigglywiggly - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
Uhm, I am going to be the first to say this...It's hardly any smaller! (Not that the 360 is big)
Also it looks like a normal 360 and someone got a heatgun on the faceplate and it bent inwards.
michal1980 - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
You need a special port for this add on?biohazard75 - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
Yes and no. The Kinect connects to the 360 via a USB port, however it also requires more power than can be supplied by the USB port.So the 'new' Kinect port on the new 360 allows the Kinect to be connected via a single wire.
Connecting the Kinect to an old 360 requires an additional power lead (probably a power injected USB connector will be supplied).
(I never want to type Kinect/Connect again...)
can - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
With both chips being proprietary items (ATI and PowerPC) Who integrated them on one die? I guess I find it hard to believe that each company would give up it's design specs so that someone could engineer it for a single chip.piroroadkill - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
We need that heatspread off.bill4 - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
From what I know it's unlikely the EDRAM was integrated. That's another reason it'd be nice to see the heatspreader off.But as for who would do it, Microsoft?
The deal for X360 was such that MS owned the CPU and GPU IP, to a point anyway, so they can go fab it wherever. That was a big difference to the original Xbox, where Ms was forced to pay Intel and Nvidia whatever they wanted.
can - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
I wasn't aware of that, thank you. Makes me wonder how much info (specs, design) was given to whom and by whom? Still leaves me with questions, but it's a useful answer.xboxknow - Saturday, June 19, 2010 - link
IBM did the design and IBM and Chartered build the CGPU chips, mostly IBM at this point. It's indeed 45nmThere are 2 chips underneath, a large die containing the CPU /
GPU function and a smaller EDRAM, procured elsewhere