Update: Good news for you and me both; this bad boy can also be oriented sideways.
At last night’s Game Awards, Microsoft finally showcased the name and physical design of the next-gen Xbox it has been referring to as “Project Scarlett” for the past few years and which is coming for the holiday season in 2020. Meet the Xbox Series X, a tall drink of water. Well, more like a tall Dell workstation PC tower from the early 2000s.
In an interview with GameSpot, head of Xbox Phil Spencer explains the console’s unconventional design as a sound and cooling consideration. The Xbox Series X has one large, quiet fan that drives air out of the top. That is all well and good, but it is certainly not going to fit in my TV stand where my current Xbox One X goes, and I have no idea where I would put it.
The Xbox Series X may not be the only next-generation console with an unconventional design. Leaked patents depict Sony’s PS5 as strange as well, with a deep V in its rectangular body, also designed to aid cooling. The actual device, however, could still look entirely different.
In addition to its strange design, the Xbox Series X will have powerhouse guts that necessitate this extreme cooling design. Previous news about Project Scarlett has promised 4K visuals at 60 frames per second, thanks to a clutch of GDDR6 RAM and a custom AMD Zen 2 CPU. But, as the name “Xbox Series X” kind of implies, there may be other Xboxes coming in this next generation that we have yet to see.
Maybe one of those will be a more traditional rectangle.
