Xbox 360 News

Keep in mind that this requires opening your Xbox 360 and thus it will void your warranty. What they did is add rubber pads on the DVD-drive case on the opposite side of the laser. Now when moving the console, which results in the disc inside moving too, the disc will hit the rubber pads first. These rubber pads will limit the inclination angle of the disc so it can't touch the metal laserblock and get scratched. It'll touch the rubber pads, but that shouldn't scratch the disc.

The Xbox 360 system has a single chip (with 165 million transistors) for its CPU. This chip is in fact a three-way symmetric multiprocessor design. The three PowerPC cores are identical, except that they are physically reflected through the X and Y axis. Each of the CPU cores is a specialized PowerPC chip with a VMX128 extension related to (and partially compatible with) the VMX instructions in the G4 and G5 CPUs. The three CPU cores share a 1MB Level2 cache. Each processor has 32KB each of data and instruction Level1 cache. The chip's front-side bus/physical interface has a 21.6GB/second bandwidth, and runs at 5.4GHz. The high frequency clocks are generated on-chip by four phase-locked loops: two for the core clocks, two for the PHY clock.

He was demonstrating Xbox 360 to delegates at this week's UBS Global Media Conference in New York. During an hour-long speech he progressed through the usual demo of Live, Arcade and the machine's connectivity. He then said, "If Sony does hit the specs which they've said they'll have there's a debate. There are a couple of categories where they outdo us, and there's several categories where we outdo them."

The PC is an AMD FX-55 CPU, with dual NVIDIA 6800 Ultra video cards running in SLI and RAID 0 on dual Western Digital 74gig 8MB cache 10,000 RPM drives. They compared the graphics on PC and Xbox360 in ‘Call of Duty 2' and ‘King Kong', 2 games that are released on both platforms, using the same high-definition LCD monitor. PC games ran at 1280x768, a close approximation to the 1280x720 the 360 provides when running in 720p.

An Associated Press tech writer gives his impressions of the new 360 titles out.

If you've scored an Xbox 360, some actual games are going to be the next logical purchase — unless you auctioned it off for thousands of dollars on eBay.

We've worn our fingers to the bone the past few weeks (just for you) playing through the 18 titles available when the system launched. While the offering is diverse, many of the games are merely visually tweaked versions from the older consoles. Worse, Xbox 360 games can cost a whopping $60 — roughly $10 more than games for older systems.

Here's our take, from best to worst.