Impress Watch takes tools to 60 gigabyte Xbox 360

When there's a new hardware launch, you can always count on the guys at the Impress Watch family of sites to bust out the tools. For the 60 gigabyte Xbox 360 today, the tool in question was a Watt Checker from Sauna Supply. Using this device, Game Watch measured how much energy the new rev of the hardware consumes.

The results were astounding! Well, only if you were extremely sure that the 60 gigabyte system included a new rev of the 360's internals, that is. This is apparently not the case.

In November of last year, Game Watch's sister site PC Watch measured the amount of consumption from the Value Pack version of the 360. That rev of the hardware included the new Falcon chipset, and the differences were quite pronounced. When in the dashboard, the energy consumption was reduced from the 153 watts of the launch hardware to 103 watts. When racing through Forza Motorsport 2, the consumption went from 174 watts to 122.

Game Watch repeated the test with the 60 gigabyte model and got 100 watts for the dashboard and 120 watts for a Forza 2 play session.

This, it believes, is strong evidence that the hardware is Falcon-based rather than Jasper-based.

Hiroshige Goto has a full report on the Jasper/Falcon chipset differences in a July installment of his absolutely wonderful Weekly Overseas News column, but the basics are that Jasper reduces the system's GPU to 65nm on top of Falcon's CPU reduction to 65nm. (For those who can reading the Nihongo, that particular Goto column is full of speculations on further hardware revisions for the 360 board).

Here are a few other points mentioned in the Impress article.

The article says that the site's editors picked up its 60 gigabyte model from a shop somewhere in the city (that city being Tokyo, I presume) Thursday afternoon. The editors' shop of choice was sold out of Elite models but had Standard (60 gigabyte systems) and Arcade models. The site speculates that people are picking up the higher gig Elite model in anticipation of the coming firmware update from the gods (they don't call it an update from the gods... that's just my opinion).

Opening up the box, the site found few differences compared to the November Value Pack. Powering up the system, it found 49 gigabytes of space left on the hard disk. Microsoft packed the system with 19 Xbox Live Arcade demos along with demos of four full titles: Call of Duty 3 St.Lo Demo, Fight Night Round 3, Lost Planet E3'06 demo and Lost Planet Online demo. Good lord, Microsoft... update your demos!

The site noted some major differences when they powered up Infinite Undiscovery. Compared to the launch Xbox 360, the sound from the DVD drive and fan is quieter. The differences are enough that the site expects launch buyers to want to upgrade their systems.