About Console > X-Box
With a front-loading disc tray, two buttons, and four controller ports adorning the face, the monstrous case will look right at home among your other home-theatre components. Inside this 4kg box you'll find the power of a PC (a 733MHz Intel processor; 64MB of RAM; and a custom Nvidia graphics board, the NV2A) and the heart of a video game console. Still, as nice as all that processing power is, what really matters is the onscreen result.
Video enthusiasts will appreciate that the Xbox works not only with standard 4:3 TVs but with 16:9 sets and in 60Hz as well. This means that you can view all your games in the same way as our American counterparts, at full speed with images that are crisp and sharp. A nice complement to this visual horsepower is the fact that the Xbox supports 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound and can deliver 256 simultaneous voice channels -- previously unheard of in a game system. All of this adds up to some of the richest, most realistic experiences we've yet to see in video games.
The console also comes with a built-in 8GB hard drive, so you don't need to buy expensive memory cards to save your game progress. (Proprietary memory cards are available to share files with friends.) That hard drive also opens up some other possibilities. For starters, games load quickly because they can cache levels on the speedy hard drive rather than having to read all of the game's information from the disc. Another fringe benefit is the ability to drop audio CDs into the unit and copy songs to the drive. You can then use the console to play your music rather than fumbling for your CDs. |
