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Next-gen console gaming is about power, but the Xbox Series X ($) is also seemingly about empowerment. 

The system, with its 8-core/thread CPU and AMD RDNA 2-based GPU is, on paper, the most powerful console ever. It stands tall in a surprisingly inviting design, and yes, it plays almost every Xbox game ever with backwards compatibility.

It also lets you play games however you want, whether through a subscription service, buying them digitally, owning a disc or even streaming them to your phone. It even has a smaller controller to fit more hands than ever before.

But only in testing the system could we get an idea of how it performs, the power it draws, the heat and noise it produces, and whether or not it's worth it.

Let's just say the Xbox Series X makes a powerful first impression, even if you don't need one right away.

Editor's Note: This story was originally published on November 5, It was updated on November 12, to include more comparisons to the PlayStation 5.

Design of the Xbox Series X 

The Xbox Series X is a black monolith, standing tall (or lying on its side), in your entertainment center. From first glance, it's rather plain, putting attention on your monitor or TV. But there are some cool little accents that pay dues to Xboxes past. This is industrial design I can get behind, and it only grew on me as I spent more time with it.

At x x inches ( x x mm) it's quite a different shape than the Xbox One X ( in x x inches). At its longest point, it's roughly the same height, but otherwise it has more of a cuboid design that sits taller than the last gen system. The original Xbox One was x x inches, and this doesn't seem so big in comparison. That being said, the Series X seems small when compared to the PlayStation 5, which is x x inches ( x x mm). There's no question: The Xbox is the better console when it comes to looks.

On the PC comparison side, the Corsair One, which we last reviewed last year, is x 7 x 15 inches, making it both taller and thicker than the new Xbox. Of course, that did house a discrete GPU.

On the front of the Xbox Series X, there's a 4K Blu-ray drive and a single USB Gen 1 Type-A port. The rest of the ports are relegated to the back, and include two more USB Gen 1 Type-A ports, an Ethernet jack, a connector for the power cable, the HDMI output and a slot for Xbox's new custom external SSDs. With the exception of the lock slot, each of these ports have some dots printed above them in the chassis, which should make it easier to get around by feel in an entertainment center. It's a nice, subtle touch.

Notably, the HDMI input is gone from the Xbox One. Microsoft and the Xbox team have positioned the Series X as being all about gaming here. You'll see below, though, that there is no lack of entertainment options if you want them.

You can lay the Xbox Series X down sideways on four small feet on the right side. The bottom-mounted stand is permanently attached to the system, even when you lay it down. It's small, though, and not all that distracting.

My favorite part of the design are the air holes on the top. There's a 12 x 12 grid of holes cut into the top of the chassis to release the air, and it's slightly convex, uniqueness to the monolithic design. These holes are painted green on the inside, so that when you approach the Xbox, you start to see a green circle reminiscent of the original Xbox, even if the system is off. It's a cool effect that makes the Series X feel like a living room centerpiece.

Xbox Series X Specifications 

CPU and GPU and the Velocity Architecture in the Xbox Series X 

On a mm² die, the Xbox Series X boasts both an 8-core/thread CPU based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture at 7nm, as well as a GPU baked with AMD's RDNA2 silicon, with 52 compute units. 

The whole chip has billion transistors in total, with slightly less than half of the die going to the GPU. Transistor counts here have more than doubled compared to the Xbox One X ( billion to billion). Microsoft has stated that the Xbox Series X and Series S will be the only consoles with full RDNA 2 capabilities. The DRAM is also on the SOC, with 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

The GPU allows for hardware ray tracing support, though we haven't seen software in time for this review that truly makes use for it. Like traditional PC gaming, it's still used with a mix of traditional rasterization.

In theory, the system on a chip supports 4K / Hz output, though that will depend on the monitor you use and the game itself. 

Elsewhere on the Xbox Series X's split motherboard is the SSD storage, a part of what Microsoft calls the Velocity architecture, with GB/s of I/O throughput. The Xbox also has a custom texture data decompression algorithm. This is what allows for faster load speeds that finally get on the level PC gaming has been on for years, as well as allowing features like Quick Resume to suspend and resume multiple games at once. 

One interesting spec to note is that the Xbox Series X is using ac wireless, or Wi-Fi 5. It's not upgrading to Wi-Fi 6, although it's chief competition, the PlayStation 5, is. As a device that’s likely to live in millions of people’s homes for years to come, that’s unfortunate.

Gaming and Graphics on the Xbox Series X 

Microsoft claims that the Xbox Series X can game up to 4K at Hz, though that is dependent on two factors: the game you're playing and the monitor that you're using.

Over the course of our time reviewing the Xbox Series X, we played portions of a series of games. Some, like Gears 5, The Touryst, Forza Horizon 4 and Gears Tactics already had been optimized. Others, like Marvel's The Avengers and Madden NFL 2K21 were the Xbox One versions of the game, but will have optimizations soon. 

Some games, like the Versus mode in Gears 5 support 4K, in theory. The Xbox Series X uses HDMI , which is largely relegated, as of this writing, to a few TVs and even fewer monitors. For us, 4K60 was still the limit, and I imagine that will be the case for most people for the immediate future.

Still, games look and play great on the Xbox Series X. It doesn't take much of a trained eye to tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps, and any game that could take advantage of that did. Some games, like Dirt 5 will have modes to prioritize performance or visuals, letting you choose how to use the system's power (this game also had it on some last gen systems). Those games are the closest we've seen on consoles to the experience PC gamers get when customizing settings. It's not much, but it's a choice.

Knowing that games can run at 60 fps both in p and 4K is a big step. As recently as last-gen, many games were prioritized at 30 fps. The power of the Series X brings Xbox into the same realm as PCs in that regard, though we'll have to wait until the right content and monitors are more prevalent to see if it can match PCs in high-end gaming.

Even some older titles I pulled up, like in Halo: The Master Chief Collection, ran smoother than I expected (of course, for the oldest games, there's only so much that can be added).

And because backwards compatibility is almost entirely there, minus some Kinect games, I was even able to go and download a freebie from the Xbox days, Aegis Wing, to my library, and it worked just as I remembered it.

Of course, the performance of the Series X will likely be pushed more to its max in time. As we've seen with just about every console generation, developers tend to get better at optimizing for these platforms. Still, if you're an Xbox fan who plays current and previous-gen games, they will run best here. 

Heat, Power and Noise on the Xbox Series X 

It's quite difficult to run something like a traditional benchmark on a console, but three metrics give you a pretty good idea of how powerful a system is: heat, power and noise.

This is the first time we've taken these numbers for consoles, so we don't have competitors to compare to yet. But when we do, we'll update this review with the comparison.

During a race in the version of Forza Horizon 4 optimized for the Series X, we saw a peak of watts. In Gears 5, another optimized game, it peaked at watts, though was largely in the high 's.

In a backwards compatible game, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, the system pulled a peak of watts.

Those are all lower numbers than what we saw with PS5 launch titles. Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, pulled a peak of watts in both fidelity mode (4K, ray tracing, 30 fps) and performance mode (4K upscaling, 60 fps). Astro's Playroom peaked at watts. At the time of testing, we didn't have access to any of the same games on the two platforms, but these numbers suggest that the Xbox Series X will be the cheaper system to run.

We also counted cumulative power use measured in watt hours, though those are adjusted to the slightly different lengths of the samples. Run long enough, Gears 5 would clearly cause the system to use the most power.

When the Xbox Series X is at idle, it typically pulls around watts, while the PS5 is around watts . With the system asleep, it runs around watts, which is more than the PS5 falling between 3 - 4 watts in rest mode. (Note that we reviewed the Series X in the "Instant On" power mode, which turns the system on from sleep almost immediately and allows for game downloads to be started remotely from your phone. Another setting, "energy-saving," is more environmentally friendly but doesn't offer all of those features.)

Unsurprisingly, idle uses more power than putting the system in sleep mode (you can see in our charts where we turned the system on). With default, out of the box settings, it takes the system almost 10 minutes to go from a game to a fully idle state.

The Xbox Series X uses a single mm fan at the top of the system to bring air in through the bottom of the system. This is a part of what Microsoft calls its "parallel cooling architecture," with three air flow channels, a sizable heatsink over the chip, a vapor chamber and a split motherboard (the RAM, CPU and GPU are on one side, with the I/O on the reverse).

In any case, the system was effectively silent. We measured ambient sound in our test at dBA (a measure of decibels as heard by the human ear). With the system idle, our sound meter measured dbA, and while racing in Forza Horizon 4, it ranged from to For what it's worth, with it on my desk next to my monitor, I couldn't make out the difference (the measurements were taken from approximately three feet from the system). With it further from me, underneath my television, I doubt I would notice it at all. (Our sound tests were performed with digital games, rather than utilizing the disc drive.)  I'm extremely impressed with what Microsoft has done with the cooling system to keep it this quiet.

The PS5 is only slightly louder. It measured dBA at idle, ranged from to dBA with Spider-Man: Miles Morales in fidelity mode and to   dBA in performance mode. It did occasionally make a high pitched whirring when in idle or rest mode, but not under load.

We took images of the Xbox Series X through a Flir thermal imaging camera. The hottest point on the system was degrees Celsius ( degrees Fahrenheit). In the image, you can see the sort of vortex shape that Microsoft has promoted in its advertising.

From a top-down view, the hottest point is degrees Celsius ( degrees Fahrenheit), which includes the hot air being ejected from the multiple holes at the top of the system. Microsoft has incorporated cooling into the overall design, and to great effect. 

The one big question I have about this design in the long term is what it means for dust.

"There is not a user accessible way to open/clean the system, which was designed to be very open for air flow, and blowing compressed air through the intake vents will help loosen any dust that has accumulated," a Microsoft spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. In comparison, Sony's PlayStation 5 has dust catchers for users to clean out every so often. 

Upgrading Storage on the Xbox Series X 

The Xbox Series X has 1TB of built-in storage as part of its Xbox Velocity Architecture, but that may not be enough for those who have lots of games downloaded. Of that 1TB, only GB is available after the Xbox software and OS is applied.

As of this writing, Xbox's major offering for this is a 1TB Storage Expansion Card from Seagate, which costs $ That plugs into the back of the system, which brings a sort of nostalgia for the days when we had memory cards for games. This is one of the big differences from Microsoft’s competitor, Sony's PlayStation 5, which lets you install compatible PCIeNVMe SSDs like those you would install in your PC.

The Seagate Expansion Card will let you play games directly from the card, including games optimized for the Series X as well as backwards compatible games.

You can also use an external USB hard drive to play Xbox games from previous generations, like the Xbox One, Xbox and original Xbox. An external will not, however, play games for the Series X.

Xbox Series X Controller