Rumor: Slimmed-down Xbox 360 motherboard images leaked

by Griffin McElroy on Mar 17th 2010 12:24PM

Last week, speculation surrounding a pending announcement of the oft-rumored, slimmed down "Valhalla" model of the Xbox 360 was kicked into high gear, thanks to a Microsoft hiring notice for a motherboard engineer, and Steve Ballmer's reference to "more form factors" for the hardware. Earlier today, a Chinese tech forum purportedly posted a pair of pictures of the newly remodeled motherboard, which has undergone a massive size reduction from the current iteration of Xbox 360 hardware.

A few noteworthy changes in the motherboard (full pictures of which can be found after the jump) are a consolidated GPU/CPU (one of the rumored features of the Valhalla chipset), an extra SATA port, and a much smaller heatsink. Though the design could just be a mock-up from an extraordinarily talented modder, it certainly looks like professional-quality work. We've contacted Microsoft to see if they'll comment on the skinny-fied hardware.

Source

Tags: hardware, microsoft, motherboard, rumor, steve-ballmer, valhalla, xbox-360

Reader Comments (115)

Thanks pibs. I'll do some more research.

Xbox 360 Micro..?
Could this be a work towards the 'Pheonix'

Does anyone see built-in WiFi in there?

It's right next to the blue tooth!

They're making more room in the case for natal hardware. Or ice cubes.

Looking at that fan I'm pretty curious as to the redesign of the case since I don't think that heatsink or fan will clear the existing case, even more it would just draw hot air over and over again.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with the case design.

Just some random speculation:

Maybe that Xbox 360 Arcade price drop to $130 in Canada is a sign of things to come. They'll drop the price to $130, sell the Slim Arcade for $199, the Slim Elite for $299, and the Slim Elite with Natal for $399.

Or maybe they're making it smaller to incorporate Natal directly into the console?

Or it could just be a rumor.

Well, my first and only Xbox 360 died by RROD a few months ago after a good two years of faithful service, and I have to get a new one one of these days. I might just wait until E3 to see if this Slim Xbox 360 is more than just a rumor.

eh....why slim it? its already cramed in there

Actually its not. On top of it, neither the gpu or cpu even have a fan, just 2 fans blowing air out of the case. Also, anything over 2 cores needs something of a fan on it, in my opinion. Even RAM needs fans nowadays. I don't know how microsoft got the console to last so long without some kind of fan blowing on the cpu/gpu sink to keep it cool. Even the ps3 has a fan blowing on its main processor.

I can see it now! An entirely new generation of overpriced hard drives!

My guess is they'll do like Sony did with the later PS2 revisions, and keep the current case while moving the power brick into the case. Using that Microsoft branded chip as a size comparison, this board looks to be about as deep as the old one, but ~5 narrower, enough to fit the bricks internals.