Xbox Series X/S coming on 10th Nov, pricied at £449/£249

[HEXUS]

And you will be able to get these new consoles on xBox All Access plans from £21/$25 a month.

Read more.

[DevDrake]

This just killed all my hype for new GPUs...

[Spud1]

Thats not bad really taken on the monthly plan - £28.99 (before any discounts) works out the same as a list price console + GP ultimate for the 24 months. In reality, that game pass part would be discounted by 50% or so if you have half a brain, so its really costing you £100 more over the 2 years compared to buying it outright.

Still not for me, I would rather buy a GPU (particularly since more and more console "exclusives" are coming to PC now. Kinda ironic given the whole Epic debacle), but seems a reasonable deal tbh.

[Gentle Viking]

Yeah.
Not that i am ever going to flip flop on PC, but still the geek inside me want to know it all.

[Yoyoyo69]

If they discounted the Gamepass a little with the All Access, it would be a no brainer, as it is I'll have to wait and see.

Do I pay close to double for a more powerful console? Or buy the lower teir which will have struggle / offer less of an experience.

I'm also worried about games being hampered to make sure they can perform as stated on the Series S (in theory they shouldn't, but most devs are poor / lazy / greedy nowadays).

[kalniel]

but most devs are poor / lazy / greedy nowadays.

Really?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The Ryzen 7 3700X costs more than the XBox Series S with an 8 core Zen2 CPU. It really looks decent for an entry level console.

[KultiVator]

So Microsoft broke cover first. Will be interesting to see Sony's next move.

Predictions for Console + GamePass monthly contract offerings were bang on the money - and good to see this is not just limited to the lower-end S-Series SKU.

Didn't foresee the EA Play tie-in - but it could be a good way to build on GamePass's appeal for those not averse to EA (not all gamers are wise to their miserable scumbaggery over the last 30-something years). At least they (EA) are finally putting some effort into developing some better-quality Star Wars tie-ins than the pretty - but incredibly lack-lustre - BattleFront games (LootBoxHellGate).

Sony have been nurturing closer ties with Activision / Blizzard - maybe they'll they have something similar to announce? Or maybe Microsoft has outflanked them here, as they appear to have on overall raw power of the X-Series SoC, backwards compatibility and game-streaming via xCloud (now also being bundled into GamePass Ultimate).

[Iota]

£1.00 x 1 = £1.00 (1st month of Xbox Game Pass is £1.00)
£10.99 x 23 = £263.76 (Xbox Game Pass Ultimate)
£18.00 x 23 = £414.00 (X Console cost)
£27.99 x 1 = £27.99 (X Console cost)

£414.00+£27.99 = £441.99
£449.99 - £441.99 = £8.00

So you're actually saving money by buying the console over 12 months, assuming you would have gone for the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. That actually isn't a bad deal at all, and I'm a PC gamer....

If you go for the S in the same way, it's even better, you save £23.00 assuming you would go for the Ultimate Game Pass.

[kompukare]

The Ryzen 7 3700X costs more than the XBox Series S with an 8 core Zen2 CPU. It really looks decent for an entry level console.

Never mind R7 4800U's as AM4 CPUs, this is the CPU I would like to build a mini PC with.
Guess there are no details on the SOC so far.
But if this is 4 TFLOPS vs 12 TFLOPS for the Series X proper with the only differences being the GPU, then taking the floor plans of the X one:

Even with the GPU a third of the size it will still be a big SOC.
Let's see Tom's says the GPU of the X series takes up 47.5% of 360.4mm², so around 171mm². So that means the rest of the SOC takes up 190mm². Add back a third of 171mm² (57mm²) gets us to 246mm² so say 250mm².
Navi 10 is 251mm² according to the Wikipedia.
So I guess the whole package is cheap enough but I'm sure 5700 XT could be sold for £250 given enough volume.
Guess it mainly feels cheap because per mm² CPUs tend to be pricier than GPUs (Bulldozer excepted, of course).
Of course, Xbox Series S comes with a case, PSU and NVMe drive too.
Pity these things are no longer hackable or offer a Linux distro although the solder 10GB memory would eventually be a limit.

[Saracen999]

That does actually look like a pretty decent deal (for the X), compared to the quoted hardware price.

I have three reservations. First, how much might the X hardware get discounted after the initial take-up. The more that proves to be, the less Good the monthly deal gets.

Secondly, it depends what the "100 games" are. My bet is that at least some will be of utterly no interest to me. For instance, football games. I'd be more inclined to pay to NOT play those, than to play. How many of the 100 fall into my "no way" category. Conversely, how many are in the "really want" category?

Third, it depends if you're a gaming gadfly, or not. I'm not. I tend to buy a relatively small number of games these days (unlike years ago, when I went through hundreds), but to pick ones I'll play a lot. And for those, I don't want access vanishing after the two years is up. I'm much more inclined to pay £x to "own" (i.e. have permanent playing rights) to my games, over many years, but be far, far more selective over what I get.

And as someone not into playing strangers online, I'm only really interested in either standalone games or at most, LAN-type environments with actual friends, physically in the same place.

So, decent deal though the monthly route is, I'm more inclined to just buy the hardware and the carefully selected games I might want.

And that means that the £450 quoted price for the X is aa good chunk of change off the cost of just buying a new PC, spec'd for a decent, if not state-of-art gaming machine, but that can also multifunction as a well-specified general purpose machine (which I'm contemplating anyway).

All told, decent deal though it appears to be .... it's not for me.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Never mind R7 4800U's as AM4 CPUs, this is the CPU I would like to build a mini PC with.
Guess there are no details on the SOC so far.
But if this is 4 TFLOPS vs 12 TFLOPS for the Series X proper with the only differences being the GPU, then taking the floor plans of the X one:

Even with the GPU a third of the size it will still be a big SOC.
Let's see Tom's says the GPU of the X series takes up 47.5% of 360.4mm², so around 171mm². So that means the rest of the SOC takes up 190mm². Add back a third of 171mm² (57mm²) gets us to 246mm² so say 250mm².
Navi 10 is 251mm² according to the Wikipedia.
So I guess the whole package is cheap enough but I'm sure 5700 XT could be sold for £250 given enough volume.
Guess it mainly feels cheap because per mm² CPUs tend to be pricier than GPUs (Bulldozer excepted, of course).
Of course, Xbox Series S comes with a case, PSU and NVMe drive too.
Pity these things are no longer hackable or offer a Linux distro although the solder 10GB memory would eventually be a limit.

I wonder how it will do against the PS4 PRO or XBox One X??

[Iota]

That does actually look like a pretty decent deal (for the X), compared to the quoted hardware price.

I have three reservations. First, how much might the X hardware get discounted after the initial take-up. The more that proves to be, the less Good the monthly deal gets.

Secondly, it depends what the "100 games" are. My bet is that at least some will be of utterly no interest to me. For instance, football games. I'd be more inclined to pay to NOT play those, than to play. How many of the 100 fall into my "no way" category. Conversely, how many are in the "really want" category?

Third, it depends if you're a gaming gadfly, or not. I'm not. I tend to buy a relatively small number of games these days (unlike years ago, when I went through hundreds), but to pick ones I'll play a lot. And for those, I don't want access vanishing after the two years is up. I'm much more inclined to pay £x to "own" (i.e. have permanent playing rights) to my games, over many years, but be far, far more selective over what I get.

And as someone not into playing strangers online, I'm only really interested in either standalone games or at most, LAN-type environments with actual friends, physically in the same place.

So, decent deal though the monthly route is, I'm more inclined to just buy the hardware and the carefully selected games I might want.

And that means that the £450 quoted price for the X is aa good chunk of change off the cost of just buying a new PC, spec'd for a decent, if not state-of-art gaming machine, but that can also multifunction as a well-specified general purpose machine (which I'm contemplating anyway).

All told, decent deal though it appears to be .... it's not for me.

All completely valid reservations, we know that the hardware will get discounted at some stage after launch. I don't follow consoles enough to recall how quickly that happens though. I think one of the benefits of the game pass is that Microsoft swap out the games on a fairly frequent basis, so you wouldn't be stuck with the same 100 games to play, plus EA Play titles are also being added to that list of titles shortly. I do wonder if other companies are looking at doing so, in which case the game pass may become pretty good value for trying out different games to bookmark for later purchases (when the pricing is reasonable).

I'd also pay to not have to put up with any football games

[kompukare]

I wonder how it will do against the PS4 PRO or XBox One X??

Don't Microsoft claim it's about the same speed as the XBox One X?

Anyway, the SOC is 20 CU as it runs slower than the Series X with it's 52 CU.
The Wikipedia has been updated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_(...#Xbox_Series_S
"a custom RNDA2 with 20 CUs at 1.55 GHz for 4 TFLOPS"
vs
"It has a total of 56 compute units (CUs) with 3584 cores, with 52 CUs and 3328 cores enabled, and will be running at a fixed 1.825 GHz. This unit is capable of 12.15 teraflops of computational power."
So the actual fraction of the bigger one would be more. I'd assume something like 22 CUs with 2 extra for yields. So the GPU part is more like 40% of Series X's one.

[cptwhite_uk]

You missed /s kalniel, although I'll be the first admit if there was any post that didn't need it, it was probably this one.

[Tunnah]

The issue with xbox is all their games come to PC; there's practically no exclusives for the xbox, so I just don't see the point in them, as a PC user.

The playstation though..hell I still want a PS3! There's so many amazing exclusives. If the PS5 has backwards support all the way to PS3 I'll probably get one, as the PS3 emulator is coming along too slowly, and even though they've said they're going to bring more exclusives to PC, the time frames don't fill me with much hope. I wanna play God Of War *before* climate change kills us all thankyouverymuch