Xbox One Teardown
Teardown
Teardowns provide a look inside a device and should not be used as disassembly instructions.
Featured Guide
This guide has been found to be exceptionally cool by the iFixit staff.
After eight years, Microsoft has finally released a proper successor to the Xbox 360—the Xbox One. Will this be the One Xbox to rule them all? Follow us as we journey into the tower of Microsoft's new console—coming to you straight from Mordor New Zealand!
We regularly put pics of "the daily grind" on Instagram, announce teardowns on Twitter, and keep up with friends on Facebook!
Edit Step 1 — Xbox One Teardown ¶
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This is the One. The One we've all been waiting for this whole time. The Xbox One.
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Think we're pulling your leg with all this New Zealand funnybusiness? Check out the folks in the background of this Xbox New Zealand release photo—that would be our very own Samantha Lionheart (in red) and Optimus Goldberg (in orange).
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Tech Specs:
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8-core x86 processor
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HDMI pass-through
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8 GB of RAM
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500 GB storage capacity
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Blu-ray/DVD drive
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Edit Step 2 ¶
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Before any teardown, we take a few test photographs.
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We don't like to brag, but this is quite possibly the best picture of a roll of toilet paper we've ever seen. Or it just might be super-early in the morning.
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This message is to all the toilet paper manufacturing companies out there: this is how it's done.
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Full resolution in case you want to make it your wallpaper.
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If anyone ever says that iFixit is not fond of toilet humor, feel free to point them to this teardown.
Edit Step 3 ¶
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The Day One Edition includes a commemorative controller, with appropriate inscription smack dab in the middle: "Day One 2013."
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The design of the Xbox One controller builds on that of the Xbox 360 controller, with a few updates.
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The development cost for the Xbox One controller exceeded $100 million, according to a Microsoft representative. Some of the prototypes featured built-in displays and cameras, a cartridge for emitting smells, and even a built-in projector.
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Also tumbling out of the, er, box: the Kinect 2.0 unit and a
miniature Xbox Oneenormous power brick.
Edit Step 5 ¶
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Making our way to the bottom, we check the tags to find…power ratings in Spanish?
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El Xbox One consume 180 Wh de energia y en modo de espera consume 20 Wh.
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The Xbox One is identified as model 1540 and was designed by the Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA.
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Our Xbox One was manufactured on October 14, 2013 in China.
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And, in friendly words across the back, Microsoft says "Hello From Seattle."
Edit Step 7 ¶
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Don't panic; we're prepared.
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Despite the lack of screws, we find a way in with a plastic opening tool—prying the grille up.
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This is similar to the Bottom Vent disassembly procedure in the Xbox 360.
Edit Step 8 ¶
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Speak, friend, and enter. Giving the right password and freeing some clips, we gain access to the innards of the Xbox One.
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We flip open the top case, granting us a peek at the
mines of Moriadark chambers within. -
While our first peek doesn't reveal much, we are ready to venture through shadow and circuit…
Edit Step 9 ¶
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Our Pro Tech Screwdriver Set is almost as anxious to get into this console as we are.
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The Pro Tech set was much easier to get through customs than our backup opening tools.
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While we're not sure how they stand up against orcs, our screwdrivers are awesome for removing the small screws holding the Wi-Fi board in place.
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A quick wave of our spudger, and the Wi-Fi board is out and ready for inspection.
Edit Step 11 ¶
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There are eight 64 mm T9 Torx screws securing the upper metal shield to the chassis.
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That is just over two-and-a-half inches of threaded fun!
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Game consoles are one place where we haven't seen the smaller, lighter, thinner trend taken to extremes—and we're okay with that. We like a device with a little meat on its bones, if it means finding standard fasteners like these screws—a win for repairability.
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Small, light, and thin can be repairable too! We've seen it happen.
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Edit Step 12 ¶
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This is our first real glimpse inside the Xbox One.
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Well, that was easy. The entire Xbox One assembly simply lifts off from the lower case.
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We appreciate a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, hidden inside a hobbit hole as much as the next person, but for repair purposes, it's nice when things are a little more straightforward.
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How much do we care about the Hobbit Hole breakfast at Denny's? Oh, you know…
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Edit Step 13 ¶
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In another win for repairability, the Blu-ray/DVD drive is connected to the motherboard via a SATA data connector.
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While we are tempted to re-watch the entire LOTR trilogy on Blu-ray, our own quest to destroy the One Xbox in the fires of the teardown table is more dire.
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We take a look at the underside of the optical drive, finding a few ICs and a large ribbon cable:
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Microsoft MS0DDDSPB1 1326-BTSL ATNGS501
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Texas Instruments 37T AVY7
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Edit Step 14 ¶
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Unfortunately, the Xbox One doesn't officially feature a replaceable hard drive—but then, we're not much for playing by the rules. Out it comes.
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Bad news: replacing the hard drive requires voiding the warranty. Good news: it's a standard 2.5 inch SATA II drive. Unknown news: we're not sure if the Xbox One will recognize unformatted SATA hard drives.
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Inside our Xbox One, we find a Samsung Spinpoint M8 ST500LM012 500 GB 5400 RPM with 8MB Cache SATA II 3.0Gb/s hard drive.
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Newegg seems to have favorable reviews of this drive.
Edit Step 15 ¶
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Teardown update: We tossed the One's hard drive into one of the tech writers' secondary hard drive bays. We found five NTFS partitions:
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Temp Content: 44 GB capacity, 27.1GB available (in an Xbox that we never turned on).
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User Content: 391.9 GB capacity, none used.
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System Support: 42.9 GB capacity, 34.1 GB available.
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System Update: 12.8 GB capacity, 11.8 GB available.
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System Update 2: 7.52 GB capacity, 7.47 GB available.
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Sadly, we were not able to go the other way -- we didn't have a spare hard drive (in New Zealand) to put into the Xbox One. So that will have to wait for another day!
Edit Step 17 ¶
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"X" marks the spot. The heat sink/fan assembly is secured to the motherboard with a few T9 Torx screws.
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After the infamous red ring of death, we're not surprised to see a beefy cooling system on this Xbox.
Edit Step 19 ¶
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We're happy to report that, should your new Xbox One have cooling issues, replacing the fan or heat sink is easy-breezy.
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All it takes is a simple flick of the spudger to separate the 112 mm diameter fan from the heat sink.
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That's one small step to replace, one giant leap for repairability.
Edit Step 20 ¶
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What do our elf eyes see? An army of integrated circuits. The heavy hitters include:
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X887732-001 DG3001FEG84HR (includes AMD "Jaguar" 8-core CPU + AMD Radeon Graphics GPU)
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16x SK Hynix H5TQ4G63AFR 4 Gb (512 MB) DDR3 SDRAM (total of 16 x 512 MB = 8 GB)
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X861949-005 T6WD5XBG-0003
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SK Hynix H26M42003GMR 8 GB eMMC NAND Flash
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ON Semiconductor NCP4204 GAC1328G Integrated Power Control IC
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Realtek RTL 8151GNM Ethernet Controller
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Texas Instruments TPS2590 3-V to 20-V High Current Load Switch
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Edit Step 21 ¶
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The backside of the motherboard is a glorious, green field, void of any integrated circuits.
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As always, a big thanks to the folks at Chipworks for helping us determine names of the doodads we found inside the Xbox One!
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If you haven't, already, check out their in-depth analysis of the PS4!
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Edit Step 22 ¶
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Microsoft Xbox One Repairability Score: 8 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair):
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Only a few tools are required to take the whole console apart. The opening procedure is similar to, but much easier than, any Xbox 360.
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Once inside, a clean, no-nonsense modular design allows the drives, fan, heat sink, wireless board, and front daughterboard to be easily replaced.
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Clips instead of screws make opening the case more difficult than necessary, but the absence of adhesive and proprietary screws helps soften the transgression.
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The hard drive is relatively difficult to access; you'll have to void the warranty if you'd like to upgrade/replace it.
Comments Comments are onturn off
Yeah, no brainer
I'm curious if the replacement drive needs special formatting, or if the system has a built-in recovery 'partition' that will format the drive and install the OS automatically on a stock hard-drive?
Id imagine it wouldn't have a recovery system since the user is not meant to replace the hdd wether upgrading or replacing through fault. every previous Ms console has had proprietary locked hard drives in some form
I downloaded the full OS and day one patch from Microsoft website yesterday. if you replace the harddrive. u will need those files
Whos the fan OEM? Anything under that black sticker?
Doug Nagle, · Reply
Definitely a mistake on MS' part to not officially support HDD replacement on the Xbox One. 500GB is nothing when your installing 25GB - 50GB games, music, and movies. I have a 2TB on my desktop PC build, and still can't install my entire Steam library. For guys like me 500GB just isn't gonna cut it. I'm sure we will know soon though if the HDD in the One is truly upgradeable or not.
But it will support external drives. External drives will support all functions that the internal does. So game installs will be supported.
Considering that both the ps4 and xbone use 2.5inch drives I dont really care that they are not upgradable. I would rather just by a 3-4tb external and attach it if needed, the difference between a usb 3 external and a sata 2 hdd are going to be negligible for load times.
And the PS4 doesn't support external.
I've read that the Xbox1 is fast on boot and function but, do you guys think it will it benefit from an SSD? Same with the PS4, if anyone can telll. I know my PS3 OS is kinda slow and I'm considering exchanging it for an SSD.
Yeah, the 2TB Samsung Spinpoint M9 has been announced but is it available yet? That would be a good replacement.
So it has a Marvell Avastar 88W8897, meaning 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0. All the specs I have checked so far just mention WiFi 802.11n and no BT. Does the ac network is working right out out of the box - sorry, after the first patch - or MS is saving it for future implementation?
The PS4 teardown confirmed that Sony's console has the 88W8797, with only 802.11 capabilities. This definitely gives extra point to Xbox One over the PS4 in terms of wireless connectivity.
I saw that too. Really curious on that one.
Yeah, seems like Sony missed the trick entirely here. The XBox One Marvell chip supports 'ac' and beamforming tech although this is yet to be unlocked- and doubtless will be in the near future. I guess Sony must have been trying to save a few bucks on the BoM.
Dan,
I am so glad you did it so I didn't have to! Way too curious of what is inside!
Why didn't you do a teardown of the controller or the Kinect?
Agreed! Also the power brick, please!
Is the PSU 110-240v?
Hyde Cheung, · Reply
Where is the 32MB ESRAM ?
DeepThought, · Reply
Its on the chip itself(manufact
Try replacing the HDD.
Matt Clancy, · Reply
Can i assume that the system is rebuilt to working order. I know its a stupid question but anybody that has taking something apart knows that sometime things don't always put back together as easily..lol
I honestly would have rather of had a 256GB SSD for the main drive and get some external storage going on ... performance would have been tremendously better.
Price would have also been a lot "better". A cheap 256 gig SSD costs >160 USD, the Spinpoint M8 500 gig HDD costs 60 USD. So instead of 500 dollars for an XBOX One, it would've been closer to 600 dollars.
I downloaded the full OS and day one patch from Microsoft website yesterday.
if you replace the harddrive. u will need those files
The empty pads on the top of the mainboard are very interesting. There's a pair of switches marked "warm" and "cold". There's also empty bus connectors that are likely used for debugging.
sandylee83, · Reply
Appreciate all your work and tips!
Get an XBOX One free here!
http://www.freexboxone.org/c/179750
#freexboxone #xboxone #ps4 #battlefield4 #callofdutyghos
For sure, if someone is in the business of repairing XBox Ones, it would make lots of good sense to clone an XBox 2.5" SATA hard drive onto a spare drive, to be used in the future to replace a crashed drive. Open source disk drive cloning software like Clonezilla will clone any drive, with most any file system and partitioning. If, for any reason, Clonezilla would not do the trick, there are other disk cloning packages. But I've got to believe that Microsoft uses NTFS or maybe a Unix/Linux file system for the XBox One, although they have been known to do some really stupid things, like Vista and Windows 8.
Here's a tear down of the Xbox One PSU http://lifelearningsofanearthling.blogsp...
The Xbox One is an engineering disaster for a custom made consumer product that isn't intended to be user serviceable. It's like a "Holy $@#^ we forgot that we are making a next-gen console, gotta ship this thing to stores before Holidays 2013, so just slap everything up with no thought whatsoever" hackjob.
-Why use a huge Intel retail type HSF instead of a custom cooling solution like the PS4 did?
-Why is the HDD placed completely inside the case in a manner that wastes unnecessary space and prevent users from accessing it from the outside?
-Why is the motherboard so big? There are lots of wasted PCB space that can be cut.
-Why even use a standard PC sized optical drive?
-If all those wasn't enough yet, add a external power brick to it. Again.
Before somebody tries to flame me, please explain how Valve was able to make a smaller machine with completely off-the-shelf-parts including the PSU and a GTX 780, yet much more powerful in CPU/GPU power and infinitely more user serviceable.
Yeh i seen that 2. Not only that the fan is sucking in hot air from inside the case. Who here as built a custom pc and set their hsf fan up like that raise your hands? what no one why is that ill answer for all who built a pc. Your cpu is the hottest component on the system. It needs the coolest air possible to cool it. You blow air in to the heat sink not pull air in. When you pull air in your pulling hot air over the fins. Inside a computer case abiant tempreture can hit 100+f this will mean you loose 100 f cooling right off the top. Aim that sucker blowing in the xbox one has external access for the fan why not use it instead of a exhaust. it shoul be a intake. It should also have a grill and filter not a cutsie louver. Wheres my diagonal cutters and bounce... Its modding time.
HA HA. Excelent roll
What's that USB port doing there?
Am I the only one who's a little miffed that the size of the Xbox One could've been made smaller if they didn't have that relatively large open space there?
shokikugawa, · Reply
I recently bought a replacement Xbox One Optical Drive from a guy on eBay. It is the same model number, but it has a different P/N. Do these have to match? The new drive I bought accepts disks, but I keep getting a message that 'there is a problem with my optical drive' and it won't play anything. Help?
your partition sizes are wrong because you used OS X, which uses base 10 for sizes.
The blu ray drive is not likely replaceable. The Xbox 360 dvd drive used a DVD key to lock one drive to one mainboard. It will take some time before someone figures out how to get around this on the XBone.
Base 10 is fine for this. The 500GB they advertise it with is base 10 as well.
Mylar connectors on the optical drive. No wonder they are failing. I HATE Mylar connectors, only good for intermittent contacts and coming loose in shipping.
There is an antenna there. That chip is obviously an ARM device, but danged if I can find any data on it anywhere.
What size is the SMD LED on D1 and do i notice a spot (D4) for a second LED ? A blue or green replacement might be nice.
NCP4204 GAC1328G looks like a micro. It seems to have traces to the column of inductors just north of it.
X861949-005 T6WD5XBG-0003 must be some kind of proprietary io controller.
Nate Fisher, · Reply
The board you are calling the 'RF board' is most likely the propriatory link for the controllers (as they had on the Xbox/Xbox360), and just plugs onto a USB (???) connection on the motherboard.
Why they would use an external WiFi/BT board, is a bit of a question.... outsourced engneering? I wonder what connection protocol it uses to motherboard. Nice stitching of antenna cable to case.... not!!
I've really love to know what HDMI input is. What chipset, and how do they draw it to the screen? I'd presume the DMA it to the vram somehow.
Joe de Max, · Reply
SK Hynix H5TQ4G63AFB 4 Gb (512 MB) DDR3 SDRAM (total of 16 x 512 MB = 8 GB)
Is that a miss-print as there is no hynix part with *AFB BUT there is an *AFR (H5TQ4G63AFR)
Can you replace the HDD with another to see what happens?