Xbox 360 Hardware - Motherboards

Motherboards

Microsoft avoids outright announcements of new motherboard production runs and their subsequent appearance in the market in part due to uneven distribution causing buyer's remorse and to prevent purchaser delay. However, several major (and many minor) motherboard revisions are introduced in an attempt to build systems more cheaply (and thus increase profits), and as a happy side effect, to allow them to run cooler while consuming less power. Note that there is no clear divide between the appearance of motherboard revisions in retail. Due to individual stock production, distribution and rotation, it may become difficult to find specific versions.

The power connectors on the back of these systems incorporate a "keying" system that will prevent plugging a (newer) lower-rated power supply into an older system (which needs more power). The keying system does, however, allow older power supplies to be connected to newer systems, as this poses no problem. The initial motherboard version was known as "Xenon" and used a 203 watt power supply, and lacked an HDMI video port. The "Zephyr" revision was largely the same aside from the addition of the HDMI port, and an improved GPU heatsink. The "Falcon" incorporated a newer 65 nm CPU, the original 90 nm GPU, and it required less power so it came packaged with a 175 watt power supply. "Jasper" (released late August or early September 2008) used both a 65 nm CPU and GPU, as well as 256 MB of on-board flash memory. (This was to help run a then-recent Dashboard update. Without the addition of this internal memory, a hard disk drive or memory card is required.) The "Jasper" revision required even less power, and so the power supply was also reduced to 150 watts. Xbox 360 S introduced a new motherboard version called "Trinity" with a 45 nm integrated CPU, GPU, and eDRAM (i.e. all in the same chip package). In 2011 a second model of the Xbox 360 S motherboard has been released known as "Corona" which integrates the HANA chip into the southbridge chip.