Console engineering

Most impressive engineering


  • Total voters
    47

Rikimaru

Veteran
With eurogamer article "We watched a Scorpio console get put together" I began thinking about console engineering.

I was always fascinated by Sony's cheap but sturdy and clean engineering.

PS4 CUH-1000
Monolithic plastic frame is a BD drive cover and also a fan tube.
APU fan also cools PSU.
Air intake holes hidden on sides - less probability something falls inside.
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Heatsink is pressed into EMI shield which helps to dissipate heat.
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Motherboard is clean and neatly designed.
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CUH-1000
https://ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+4+Teardown/19493

Same frame/APU, new memory. BD controller on board.
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A lot of cables because BD controller is on main board.
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Small details like this:
Power button and speaker daughterboard likely assembled as 1 piece and have been tore apart later. (photoshopped)
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PS3 Slim
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https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+3+Slim+Teardown/1121
Same points as PS4

PS2 Slim 7xxxx
It is a definition of cheap but sturdy design. Some revisions had separate EE/GS, other combined EE+GS.
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https://ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+2+Slimline+Teardown/54961
900xx revision had EE, GS and RDRAM integrated in 1 package. PSU inside.
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Last revision where EMI shield is a heatsink.
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PS3 OG - bulky monster but mb is still neat.
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PS3 Superslim cheap and ugly but small. Looking good inside though.
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PS4 Pro Neo devkit
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Nintendo
Nintendo hardware often looks nice but a little overly complicated and not so clean compared to Sony's work.
Also they rarely make hardware revisions.

Gamecube - very neat design
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https://ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+GameCube+Teardown/1727

Wii/Wii U
Nice, but too many screws/support plastic
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https://ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Wii+U+Teardown/11796
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/wii_console/0/0
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/console/0/0

Microsoft
OG Xbox - thrown together ugly PC. Even ATX PSU. Power connector soldered on board, caused fire (solder on board shattered causing bad connection).
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Xbox 360 - thrown together PC with insufficient cooling. Whole frame on clips. Ugh. X-Clamp Ugh 2x. Still uses a lot of electrolytic capacitors. Sounds like a jet. Best Xbox exterior design in history though.
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Xbox 360 Falcon - band aid for a bad design.
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Xbox 360 S - neatly thrown together PC. Worse exterior design.
Xbox 360 E - cheapened S. Pretty good exterior design.
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http://beta.ivc.no/wiki/index.php/Xbox_360_Revisions

Xbox One - badly thrown together PC. Awful. Has a connector cable extender to outer case. Support plastic for a screw. Large motherboard. A lot of wasted space.
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Xbox One S - neatly thrown together PC. With fan grill on top looks like radio.
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Xbox One Scorpio - very neatly put together Laptop/PC.
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Still does not have a clock battery.
 
Sony's designs seem more akin to laptop configurations that are compact. I'm not sure that's actually "cheap" when you look at the customizations to construction.

Adding more PCB layers also comes at a cost, but that allows for more compact designs.
 
Sony's designs seem more akin to laptop configurations that are compact. I'm not sure that's actually "cheap" when you look at the customizations to construction.
Looks to me built as cheap as possible and easy to disassemble (except first PS3 Fat for various reasons).
Sony even marks screw holes. PS3 Fat had 1 small screw marked with S on the shell.
Adding more PCB layers also comes at a cost, but that allows for more compact designs.
I do not think Sony uses more PCB layers than Xbox.
 
I don't think this thread will be going anywhere. Not if we can't even agree the 360 failures were caused by horrible engineering.
 
Why no SEGA or Coleco or Atari or Commodore?
 
I agree with you, but considering this discussion happened multiple times for over 12 years, nobody agreed about it, and nobody will listen to arguments. Some 360 were reballed (reballing is an expensive job, rebuilding the underlying balls of the chip package) and reflowed with the correct type of solder. These 360 still failed. The board warps so it will fail eventually it would just last longer with the correct type of lead-free solder. The problem was not the switch to lead-free, since everybody did so as you said, it was that MS used the wrong type with the launch 360. It was a type that was more prone to becoming brittle.

Also, very important, be careful of posters making up stories to win arguments. Sometimes 90% of the argument is real, but there's a questionable anecdote inserted to "win". It's a good trick I sometimes use.
 
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