A couple of guys from the Microsoft team recently spoke about what it actually takes to build a console from the ground up. Senior Designer for the Microsoft Device Design Team, Bryan Sparks and the GM of Xbox Devices Console Development, Leonardo Del Castillo, discussed their collaboration on the new Xbox One X.

Sparks and Del Castillo say the goal of the Xbox One X was simply to bring true 4K gaming in a smaller package and they delivered in a fantastic way. The Scorpio Engine was specifically designed to be the “most powerful system-on-a-chip” for a game console and because of that almost every part that would be housed inside of the system would need to be custom built. Although that sounds daunting, the Microsoft collaborators saw it as an opportunity to design the system around stuff like the hard drives, optical drives, and memory components however they wanted. Del Castillo says:

If you start with a bag of parts, how does that turn into a product? We needed a direction, and floor planning directions, to lead the architecture around what the motherboard will look like, what will the chassis look like. And for that you lean on the design team.”

According to Sparks, when starting a new design project, “it’s this blank canvas and you start feeding ideas and constraints.” He continued by saying:

The other part of our vision is what would embody this product. We envisioned this monolith (“2001: A Space Odyssey”). Whenever you see it in the film, it was a signal to the audience that it was the next phase of advancement. So, we kept that as a design goal: Xbox One X is the next point of advancement.”

We did not want Xbox One X to be any larger than Xbox One S, which was a huge ask as we were putting 40% more power into it (than any other console). And this is where we knew we had to work with Leo and the engineers to make that happen.”

In order to fit all that power into the console, the two Microsoft teams had to really collaborate on the design. They laid out the different components, like the motherboard for example, and then decided how the memory would be arranged and routed to the system. Eventually they decided the best place for the motherboard was on the “ceiling” of the console, and they stacked the optical drive and hard drive to fit the “optimum stacking height”. It’s like a game of Tetris up in there!

Having the mother board on the ceiling removes the need for venting on the top of the console and ensures that the power supply could live internally. The Microsoft teams also managed to squeeze the power supply behind the optical drive, which then allowed them to keep the ports on the back in almost the exact same place as the Xbox One S, making transitioning between consoles as effortless as possible.

With the Xbox One X being 40% more powerful than any other gaming system, it’s obvious that it would produce a lot of heat. At first they tried to create a “heat sink” that worked as a base with the radiator with a fan stacked on top, but it added too much height to the console. The teams decided to go a different way according to Del Castillo:

When you’re trying to scale that amount of power into the Scorpio engine, it wasn’t going to be a feasible approach to achieve the size we wanted to do. We got innovative and looked at other tech we could use and created a vapor chamber heat sink, like what you’d find in high-end PCs and graphic cards, and we believe this is the first time it’s being used in a consumer electronic.”

A vapor chamber heat sink is hollow and filled with water. A vacuum draws from the water to move heat into the radiator fins and then out of the system. A centrifugal fan assembly pushes the hot air out, with ducts and propellers, and was made specially for the Xbox One X. At this point, they still needed to figure out how to bring air IN to the console and according to Sparks, that’s where “concurrent engineering comes into play.”

The most important step was to decide which of the components got priority when it came to air flow access and minimizing the “bold hole pattern” from the Xbox One S. Sparks says it was just another thing to “innovate”.

Where we landed was grabbing the vent pattern from Xbox One S and miniaturizing it as much as we could to where it was just barely manufacturable. Which was no easy ask. It was another thing we had to innovate.”

The list of needs from the design team continued to grow. At this point they needed a 5-sided unibody with top-housing, zero draft, thin walls, and a lot of tiny pins to create the perforation pattern. A new tool was needed to make these things happen, and they would need to make it themselves. Sparks says they handled it:

But we were able to do it! Probably making the most innovative and complex injection molding tool we have ever made. We did all of this to give the outside appearance of this console the same level of precision of the work we’ve been putting into the inside.”

Del Castillo says that the hard drive’s mechanical components are “pretty much standard”, but that they work with the manufacturers to make sure the firmware’s performance is optimized specifically for the Xbox One X. “To preserve that performance, we have to take a great deal of care when it’s mounted,” said Del Castillo. So the team then made a custom mount for it to “dampen the vibrations” that are carried through the chassis.

Del Castillo explains how every part of the console was placed in just the right way and just how important it is to build it right,

Every single component and where it’s placed is critical. Start moving holes around or components, even a millimeter, it can cause interference to other products. So, it’s necessary for the engineers to be working on the design concurrently. There’s no staging like, ‘First we design a motherboard, then we’ll design a chassis around the motherboard…’ If we did that we’d wind up with a sub-optimal product.”

Sparks says it’s all worth it to create such a powerful console for the fans.

All these details, and this work, and all this refinement lead us down the track of creating, in my opinion, the best console we have ever made. We didn’t build this for us; we built this for the gamer. The gamer wins in this scenario. They get the best console we could possibly create.”

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