Xbox One Review

The actual hardware of the system is fairly impressive. The Xbox One features an 8 core AMD CPU and 8 GB of DDR 3 RAM powering a 854 MHz GPU. While these numbers won’t wow PC gamers very much, it’s a fairly drastic step up in terms of raw computing power from the last generation.

The One also has your standard Gigabit Ethernet port as well as 8012.11 a/b/g/n wireless capabilities and the slot loaded Blu-ray drive can install games to the included 500 GB hard disk. Additionally, you’ll find three USB 3.0 ports, a digital audio out, the Kinect sensor port as well as HDMI input and output (but we’ll get into that later).

The system itself is remarkably quiet, albeit not silent. It’s easily one of the least noisy consoles out there as aside from a sudden roar when the system launches a game, it’s a simple whisper of the fans turning.

My one true complaint with the hardware at this point is the hard drive. Unlike the Playstation 4, the Xbox One features an internal HD that can’t be swapped out. Microsoft has mentioned the possibility of additional storage options, and that will become a necessity sooner rather than later. The 500 GBs will be eaten up fairly quickly with games taking up 20-50 GB each, and I really would rather not have to deal with proprietary drives like we did with the 360.