Console engineering

Most impressive engineering

  • Total voters
    47
I feel the poll should at least be split into time eras, as the past and the present are entirely different feats of engineering.
 
The outer aesthetics are going to be subjective, but the internals all look simple and cheap to me. The stuff I see on a daily basis is about fifty times more expensive.
 
Good engineering is about making reliable and efficient design at the lowest possible cost. It's a failure if it doesn't work reliably, and it's a failure if there was a lower cost way to do it without losing reliability (within reasons). A lean looking board is usually because they put a lot of effort in integration instead of having massive amount of glue logic and passives. It may or may not be the least expensive choice.

The original PS3 was ridiculously over built to avoid taking chances, it wasn't good engineering despite feeling like it was built like a tank, they were throwing money at the problem (slim was much better). OTOH, the PS4 is one of the best example of efficient engineering. It's probably the most elegant launch console design ever built, among the console aiming for power. BOM was extremely low. Board was small and clean. Lots of wattage in a small space. There is little to add about the Pro, it's a continuation of the same attention to details.

360 was a joke, something you give first year students as an assignment "point out all the stupid shit they did". XB1 was a case of not taking chances, like the ps3, but it's low power was extremely easy to cool whichever way they chose. They chose simplicity with a top vented axial fan. The external power supply, and not allowing a vertical orientation, were the icing on the cake. "we suck enough not to try, we will focus on kinect". I think Kinect 2 was amazingly built, I talked about it in the kinect thread. Slim XB1 is great, nothing negative about it other than "it's very easy to cool such a low power device". It's in the can't-fuck-it-up category.

Scorpio looks like their best one yet, extremely difficult to cool, and they seem to have done a good job. The only negative is the motherboard looking like they were "throwing caps at the problem". In the end, I think if it works and it keeps the BOM low, it's definitely not stupid. Since they have copied almost everything PS4 did, it isn't exactly easy to attribute engineering prowess. It would have been a masterpiece if it came out at the same time in 2013, but now it's an awkward situation.

Nintendo is nintendo. They do good stuff, well designed, but nothing difficult ever. No risk. Maybe they deserve the point. :LOL:
 
MrFox said:
OTOH, the PS4 is one of the best example of efficient engineering. It's probably the most elegant launch console design ever built, among the console aiming for power. BOM was extremely low. Board was small and clean. Lots of wattage in a small space. There is little to add about the Pro, it's a continuation of the same attention to details.
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Agreed that it was very well built and the design was quite good. I wouldn't call it the most elegant launch console design necessarily. There were some quite obvious compromises in attaining their form factor. Cooling was noticeably louder than the competition. This became much more apparent as the load on the SOC increased making for a significantly louder machine. Going by user accounts, the PS4 also requires far more maintenance to keep the noise from going up over time due to dust. All that said, however, when going for the smallest footprint they did a very good job.

That said, if the XBO didn't exist those compromises probably wouldn't have been all that notable.

XB1 was a case of not taking chances, like the ps3, but it's low power was extremely easy to cool whichever way they chose. They chose simplicity with a top vented axial fan. The external power supply, and not allowing a vertical orientation...
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Again, this wasn't necessarily a choice for pure simplicity, it was a design choice governed by how they envisaged the console being used. The number one priority in the case design was low noise. And they achieved that quite admirably (outside of an issue with some, not all, PSUs having their rather small fan becoming noisy over time). Even at load the noise level doesn't rise significantly. And the system didn't require frequent maintenance to keep a low noise level for the console. For low noise, simple is often significantly more efficient than complex designs. The external PSU was unfortunate, but again a casualty of a designed focused very much on the noise profile of the console. Having the PSU be internal would have either generated more noise necessitating an even larger case and larger an to maintain the cooling profile without raising the noise profile.

Yes, XBO consumes slightly less power making it slightly easier. But overall power dissipation was relatively similar between the two consoles.

PS4 needed a more complex design in order to achieve their design goals. XBO did not. I'm not sure I'd say one was necessarily better designed than the other. Had the XBO featured a design goal of small versus quiet, I have no doubt we'd have seen something similar to Project Scorpio with regards to design minus things like the, IMO, excessive attention being paid to mounting the HDD.

Now an argument can be made that Microsoft went overboard designing the console around the concept of keeping the noise as low as possible to facilitate it's use a media consumption device. And an argument can certainly be made that they could have done a better job in making their external PSU more reliably quiet (mine is still whisper quiet, but I have a friend whose PSU got noticeably loud over time).

[Edit] I forgot to add that from a purely technical POV, the design engineering that went into the PS4 is likely more impressive. From an "attaining design goal" POV, I think both the PS4 and XBO are equal. They both absolutely nailed what their respective companies were going for.

Regards,
SB
 
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Rikimaru said:
But everyone was switching to lead-free solder. And YLOD was not very prominent compared to RROD.
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May not have been as public (Sony got their fair share of lawsuits), but PS3's died often. Among my friends, every console, PS1, PS2, etc., lasted until replaced with a slim and next-gen machine. Typically only after many years did it die. For PS3 though, all of us experienced at least one console death within a couple of years. I ended up having three or four. There was also a poll on this board that recorded console failures and it wasn't insignificant.

As for this poll and 'discussion', I'll add a new option because every poll should come with an 'abstain' choice. Due to the wording and presentation from the conversation starter, this certainly isn't a quality, objective discussion, which just goes to show the importance of presentation and how easily it can form the basis for a sensible, satisfying discussion, or a sudden descent into fanboy drivel.
 
Nesh said:
XBOX One design was pretty good actually. The "wasted space" was most likely for reasons of reducing noise and improving air intake for cooling.
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Consoles should just use Full Tower PC cases.
Cable extender to outer case and support plastic for a screw still does not sound like impressive engineering.
 
Sony has 40 years of creating electronics. No surprise that of all the console companies they have often been ahead of the competition regarding design.
 
Motherboard of PS4 looks very clean, and it seems it uses less components than Xbox One. Whats the "trick"?
 
Pixel said:
Sony has 40 years of creating electronics. No surprise that of all the console companies they have often been ahead of the competition regarding design.
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the innards are usually the best part by a long shot, specially managing to cram the PSU in a little space and everything still looks okay. The exterior.... The original PS1 looked good, PS2 was also okay. The PS3 fat which I've seen at a friend's house quite a few times was so so ugly.. and impractical, you couldn't place anything above it. My brother had a PS2 Slim at home and I preferred the original. PS4 just look ok but nothing outstanding. The innards are compact but the exterior is too angular for my taste, but maybe that's just me.

Despite regarding the original Xbox as ugly, maybe because it was my first console -I was coming from the PC-, I really liked the Xbox Crystal which was transparent and you could look the innards. I had all the version of the X360 save the slimmest, late one, and my favourite is the Slim. Never liked the Xbox One design much. Things have changed for the best though --Xbox One S and Scorpio. Now that the designer of Surface, Panos Panay, is the main designer of the hardware department, including the Xbox, the difference is huge in terms of quality design and overall quality.

Best designed Nintendo hardware..., I had the GC and never liked its design. The SNES and the GBA Advance are my favourite, they are touch-yourself worthy. But in this case Nintendo are more focused on their games than the innards of their consoles. Still the SNES controller is an almost perfect design, save the low quality of the stick, and I never got the Z button on the GC. The round edges of the Nintendo 64 looked a lot better to me than the square design of the GC. Despite being somehow squarely shaped, I kinda like the design of the original NES.

NES has the best looking cartridges ever made, imho.
 
Even though it was cheap and plastic looking I'd have to go with the GC. It's so dinky. If HMB is viable in the next PS/XB gen then hopefully then end up with as compact a form factor.
 
Correct answer is: Sega Dreamcast.

Fastest GPU ever - anywhere. Fastest T&L ever - anywhere. First progressive scan console. First 24-bit colour console. First online-as-standard console. First console that came with a web browser. First 60 hz PAL console.

First actively cooled console. First heatpipe cooled console.

First console with analogue triggers as standard. First console with screen in pad. First console with speaker in pad.

First console with handheld <-> console link (yes, beating Nintendo).

And it had an internal clock, like the Saturn. While all the other peasant console owners had to use sundials and their peasant games were real-time oblivious.

The answer is Sega. The answer is always Sega.

This poll is a sham.

I bid you all good day.
 
Even the knockoff 2600s never had issues and I never had to blow a 2600 cart unlike the Genesis or Coleco.
 
Carcinogenic consoles should be excluded from this poll.

Along with consoles with only a few dozen solder points the size of my fist.
 
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