XBOX 360 Slim REVIEW

Xbox 360 Slim Review

UK RRP (as reviewed): £199.99 (incl. VAT)
US RRP (as reviewed): $299.99 (excl. Tax)
UK Release Date: July 16th, 2010

The first thing to say about the Xbox 360 Slim is that the title is a bit of a misnomer. Really, it should be called the Xbox 360 Short, because the first thing anyone notices about it is that it isn’t actually much slimmer than any previous models – though it is shorter when stood on it’s end.

And if we're being really pedantic, given that the official designation for the machine we're calling Slim is ‘Xbox 360 S’, renaming is as the ‘Short’ makes just as much sense.

Even then, while the new Xbox 360 is noticeably shorter than the off-white original, there still isn’t all that much in it – not enough to indicate a dramatic redesign, anyway. Stood on its end, the Slim model measures 270 x 260 x 78mm (H x D x W) by our measurements. By comparison, ye olde Xbox 360 Premium measured 305 x 260 x 82mm.

The Xbox 360 S or 'Slim'

So, it’s roughly half a centimetre slimmer and three and a half centimetres shorter, by our reckoning. That’s not a trimming to be sniffed at, but it does bear pointing out that the Slim isn’t to the Premium as the Macbook Air was to a G4.

Most of the space has been saved by a single design too, namely shifting the Xbox 360 hard drive so that it no longer sits bulkily on top of the console in that ludicrously over-sized grey enclosure. The new Xbox 360 Slim hard drives are much more modest in physical size, measuring just 105 x 20 x 75mm to the older model’s 195 x 24 x 79mm. The new drives also swap the old bespoke connection for a standard SATA port too, though we don’t imagine that’ll make it any more possible to use a standard laptop drive in an Xbox 360 Slim. Custom file formats and the like will still form a barrier.

The hard drive for the Xbox 360 Slim no longer slots on top of the console either, but slots inside the main body instead. A hidden button on the bottom end of the Xbox 360 Slim causes a section to drop away, revealing a space for the HDD to be slotted in. The new Xbox comes with a 250GB hard disk - the same capacity as the Xbox 360 Elite bundle had - as standard.

The new Xbox 360 hard drive

Speaking of which, when you buy the Xbox 360 Slim you also get a single black, wireless controller, a wired headset and a composite video cable. While there's no HDMI cable in the box, the Slim does have HDMI output. Microsoft have finally addressed the 360's lack of WiFi, integrating 802.11 b/g/n wireless networking.

On the other hand, the Xbox 360 Slim has lost some connections too, though not any functions. The old memory card ports have been swapped for two extra USB 2.0 ports, which makes sense given that a recent Xbox 360 firmware update added USB storage to the console. There are now five USB 2.0 ports on the Xbox 360 Slim in total (two more than previous versions); three on the back, two on the front under a hinged panel.

Interestingly, the Xbox 360 Slim also has a new port especially for Kinect, Microsoft’s upcoming camera-based motion sensor controller. This port will provide power to the Kinect sensor when it launches, meaning that Xbox 360 Slim owners won’t have to use a separate power source for Kinect. Owners of older Xbox 360 models will still be able to use Kinect, but will have to use a separate power lead which is expected to be bundled with Kinect when it finally hits shelves. 

Xbox 360 Slim Noise and Heat

There are a few other aesthetic tweaks to take note of with the Xbox 360 S, such as the new glossy black finish or the fact that the Eject and power button are now touch-sensitive panels rather than physical buttons. The 360 Slim now beeps when you press either of these, while the new glossy case will record when you touch it anywhere else – it’s a real fingerprint magnet!

The really interesting visible change though is the alterations to the Slim’s cooling system. While older Xbox 360s had two smaller fans to provide (some might say inefficient) cooling, the Slim has only a single, larger fan.

The new fan measures 92mm and exhausts accumulated heat through the side of the console, rather than the rear. The immediate good news there is that, because the fans is larger, it doesn’t need to spin as fast – meaning less of the cacophony for which older Xboxes has become known for.

Measuring how the changes to the fan affect the thermal performance is obviously a tricky business, as the new design means that results gathered from any testing won’t be easily comparable. The layout of the motherboard has changed, along with the cooling system and actual hardware. The Slim uses a new 45nm chip which integrates the Xenon processor along with the Xenos GPU and eDRAM. So, it’s not just as simple as shoving a thermal probe in and running a game for five minutes.

The side fan on the new Xbox 360 Slim

Still, eager to gather some sort of data, we recorded the temperature of the exhausted both subjectively and with a temperature probe. In tests the Xbox 360 S seemed to be getting hotter than the old Premium SKU we use for game reviews. In a room with an ambient temperature of 23°C the Xbox 360 S ran at 46°C after ten minutes of playing Crackdown 2 while the older Premium model sat at 42°C.

That might sound like bad news and the immediate instinct is to say that the Slim is therefore more likely to overheat, resulting in the dreaded RROD – but we’re not sure that’s true. The subjective test (e.g. sticking the back of hands on the consoles in question) revealed that the Slim is generally only hot around the exhaust, while the Premium feels warmer all over the casing. If red rings of death are caused by the Xbox 360’s hardware overheating then the fact that the Slim is exhausting all that heat, rather than retaining it, is a good thing. It means the new fan is doing its job.

Since we were unable to disassemble the Xbox 360 S review sample we had, it’s hard to extrapolate much further in regard to the Slim’s thermal performance. The hastily gathered results don’t, for example, mean that the Slim will never red ring – that’s just not something we can feasibly test.

Looking at the Xbox 360 S in terms of noisiness is, however, a bit easier than assessing how the Slim handles overheating issues though. The method for testing is simple too; we played around with an old Xbox 360 Premium, listen, then compared the experience to playing around with the Xbox 360 Slim.

The first results were incredibly positive. When idle or playing games from the hard drive the Slim was much, much quieter than the Premium. All previous Xbox 360 models have been known for the volume of their fans, but the Slim is an exception. It’s very quiet.

Well, most of the time anyway. We occasionally found that the disc drive would whirr prohibitively, making quite a racket. The first day we spent with the Xbox 360 Slim it was very noisy, with Antony commenting that it even drowned out the older models. A subsequent re-test failed to replicate those sounds, however. Alas, since we only had only a single Xbox 360 Slim to test with, we couldn’t ascertain for sure if this was a problem common to all models or if it was a temporary problem unique to our unit.

Xbox 360 Impressions

The final criteria we chose to test the Xbox 360 Slim on was speed. While all Xbox 360 games are programmed with a specific set of hardware limitations in mind, meaning you won’t suddenly get crisper textures in Gears of War 2 if you use a Slim Xbox 360, there’s no reason why loading times can’t be reduced.

Alas, when it came to measuring boot times there was actually very little difference in it – the Xbox 360 Slim took 19.5 seconds to get from pressing the on-button to actually being in control on the main menu. The Xbox 360 Premium was only the barest fraction behind at 21 seconds.

The results of measuring the load time of most games was similarly underwhelming, with barely any appreciable difference in any of the five games we tested (results in the table below). For each game we measured the length of time it took to move from the equivalent of ‘Start Game’ to actually seeing the first level, discounting cutscenes. All games were run from the disc apart from Hexic HD, which comes pre-installed on the hard drives of all Xbox 360 consoles.