Xbox One to run silent, designed to be switched on for a decade

One of the facts Microsoft would rather forget about the Xbox 360 is how unreliable it has been over its lifetime. Early models were so unreliable the term Red Ring of Death (RRoD) became a popular term. Later generations of the console slowly got more reliable to the point where you hardly ever hear about RRoDs anymore, but those faulty machines cost Microsoft a lot of money and reputation points.

With the Xbox One, Microsoft seems determined to ensure that doesn’t happen again, and it’s part of the reason we are getting a larger console.

When you position the PS4 next to an Xbox One you can see their is a clear difference in size. The Xbox One is larger, but that’s apparently been done on purpose in a bid to not only make the next Xbox more reliable, but so that it can sit silently switched on under your TV for the next decade.

Eurogamer has spoken to Microsoft insiders and developers using the Xbox One dev kits to confirm that the larger console design is on purpose. It has allowed Microsoft to build in much better heat dissipation while at the same time keeping the machine silent. And according to developers it really is completely silent. Without the power light you apparently can’t tell if it is powered on or not, and as the disc won’t be spinning when you play games, at least not very often, that should remain the case for the consumer units.

Power use is also expected to fall well below the previous generation of consoles. The Xbox 360 started out using over 200W and then dropped down to as low as 115W as Microsoft released new hardware revisions. We could see the Xbox One draw at the lower end of that scale from launch.

Regardless of what you think about Microsoft’s decisions to advertise an always-connected console and controlling used games sales (andsubsequent u-turns), this time it looks as though they may have got the hardware right from the start. Anyone who has suffered through several RRoDs on Xbox 360s will certainly hope they have learned from past mistakes, at least.