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nightsurge said:
supercat said:
nightsurge said:
supercat said:
Assuming that the 360slim is indeed a fact, and i'll say that this is probably going to happen imho, it doesn't look like it will have the same impact as the PS3 slim design.

Why?

-The 360 started off smaller than the PS3 so the 360 already has had a slim design
-The 360 was much more unreliable as far as heating than the PS3. And therefore, the 360 won't be able to reduce size as much as if heat was never a big deal.

Those two factors will limit as to how much MS will be able to trim down the 360.

So, in summary, if MS can knock off a few bucks on production cost great for them, but I dont see how this will be that big of a deal.

The only problem is that your 2 factors are flawed.

The 360 while originally smaller than the PS3 is filled with empty space.  Plenty of room to reorganize and shrink things, unlike the PS3 which has always been packed full inside.

Also, heat was only an issue because of the stupid layout of the 360's internals.  No fan blowing air over the heatsinks.  A DVD drive RIGHT above a burning hot GPU, and only a weak/loud exhaust fan.  The 360 slim fixes this a lot by combining the CPU/GPU under one heatsink and puting a fan on top of it (hopefully, if the leaked photo is any indication).  The mobo shrank by multiple inches both horizontal and vertical.  If anything, shrinking it is going to help the heat situation a lot more.

Now, as to why this will be a big deal.  MS has already said they are treating Natal as a whole new system launch.  Expect to see a rebranding with a humungous advertising campaign behind the 360 this fall.  MS is the king of advertising and I expect the 360 slim to be a huge hit with Natal.

 shrinking the thing will help the heat situation?  wtf?

Yup.  Anyone with good knowledge of PC components and how heat moves combined with knowledge of the 360 components can tell you this.

As the 360 is now, all there are 2 chips with 2 heatsinks and tons of open space for heat to just sit and bake the 360.  The slim would drop it to one chip and one heatsink with better fan placement to solve those problems very easily.

you make it sound easy, if that was the case dont you think microsoft would have been able to make a non faulty hardware in the first place?