It is real and I have it in my hands right now.

Don't believe me?

Well let me show you.

So, first of all, Microsoft were very kind to invite us out

for a very early look at the Series X.

Now keep in mind that this is not final hardware,

this won't be shipping until almost the end of the year.

However it is definitely going to be our best look

at what the next generation of console experience

can really provide.

In this video not only am I giving you a sneak peek

at what's inside the Series X,

but on top of that we have gameplay

and pretty much every spec you might wanna know.

So today is a very good day because I can actually

walk you through exactly what is inside the Xbox Series X.

So to start with we have to look at the mainboard,

or specifically the dual mainboards.

Because of the unique design of the Series X

it actually has a very unusual cooling system.

One of the things I'm most excited about

is just how powerful the SOC inside the Series X is.

So there's a lot to talk about here

but first I wanna go over the actual CPU spec.

So keep in mind this is an SOC that has not only

the CPU and the GPU onboard,

and yet they're able to fit eight Zen 2 cores

that can clock all the way up to 3.8 gigahertz.

And that's not some kind of like boost speed,

it can run it 3.8 gigahertz, sustained, pretty much forever.

You have a couple of options

if you're a developer with this guy.

So if you want multi-threading you actually have to drop

from 3.8 to 3.6 gigahertz,

but a lot of developers are probably gonna be fine

with eight very fast cores onboard.

Now when it actually comes to games,

seven of those cores are available to a game

and one is reserved for Windows

and the OS in the background.

But that's a lot of power, especially considering

that most of this chip is actually graphics.

They just threw in eight cores

because it's much better than the previous generation.

And by much better, I mean four times better.

On top of that we have some seriously powerful graphics.

So onboard we have twice the graphics horsepower

of the Xbox One X, which I would just keep in mind,

only came out a couple years ago,

or two and a half years ago, at this point.

And beyond that we also have

eight times the graphics horsepower

of the original Xbox One.

So there are a couple of really interesting things here.

So first of all this is taking advantage of AMD's

brand-new RDNA 2.0 architecture,

which is not even out on the PC yet.

There's a lot that comes with that

and there are also some customizations

that Microsoft has done specifically for the Series X.

So, for example, there is not only ray tracing built in,

but also there's some specific hardware and audio engines

that have been built into the chip.

But the GPU itself is massive,

we're looking at 52 CUs at 1825 megahertz.

Now if you're not a speeds and feeds kind of person

that might not mean anything,

but this is an incredibly huge graphics card,

or GPU, I suppose,

and it is running at very very high clocks.

So with a Series X dev kit here

the first game I'm going to try is "Minecraft".

Now this is no ordinary version of Minecraft.

This is, to be fair, a very early technical demo,

but this is incorporating ray tracing.

So you can see, standard lighting,

looks like "Minecraft" as you expect.

However, I turn it on, the game is completely transformed.

I mean, can you see the difference here?

That's crazy, you can even see how

the lava's reflecting on the actual material of the rails.

Awesome. (chair squeaking)

That's a really squeaky chair, how annoying is that?

I get I shouldn't get up, huh?

Not only is the lighting completely transformed

but you actually can see some real depth in the world

that obviously when you have ray tracing off,

it's fine, it's sort of very brightly lit

as you're expecting with "Minecraft".

When you turn on it makes a huge difference.

Just look at the way that the torch is naturally reflecting,

and you actually can see how there's real texture

and there's real depth in the gold.

And if you look on this side you can see the diamond here.

It's really cool at how much this sort of brings

the "Minecraft" world to live.

And as we walk into this room with a bunch of

glowstone and glass panes in front,

with standard "Minecraft" lighting it looks fine,

but it really doesn't do much.

You can just sort of see a little bit of light come through.

When I turn on ray tracing it completely changes the scene.

You can see how it's almost like a rainbow effect

and the light naturally sort of cascades.

This is just a tech demo, so it is a an early look

at what ray tracing will do on the Series X.

But, I mean, it makes a huge difference, just look at that.

That's crazy.

Next I have some gameplay of "Gears 5"

running on the Xbox Series X now.

This is a very early build,

it only took them a few weeks to get this up and running,

and therefore probably some other things

are going to be tweaked and changed

before it finally comes out.

However a couple of key things to keep in mind

is that not only is this running at 4K60

with all of the ultra PC presets enabled,

they even added some additional settings

that were not even able to run on the PC or the Xbox One X.

So sit back grab your popcorn and enjoy some

true Series X gameplay.

- [JD] Okay now, open fire!

(explosions blasting)

(monsters roaring)

Del, we got a nest.

- [Del] Toss a frag, close it up!

- [JD] Got him!

(dramatic music)

(upbeat funky music)

- Feeding the SOC is a full 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory,

which you actually can see is arranged

around the chip like this.

So it's actually a slightly unusual configuration.

So Microsoft are taking advantage of a 320 bit memory bus,

and that's because there's a mixture of

one gig and two gig modules.

Now as the end user

you're probably not gonna notice any of this,

but as a developer you actually have

two classes of memory available.

So there's 10 gigs of GPU optimized memory,

which is essentially the fastest RAM

for, obviously, the graphics.

However, you also have a further 3.5 gigs

which can be played with, it's slightly slower

but, you know, you have to offload

your audio or something to that, you can use that.

Now it's kind of interesting to think

because on top of that you have a further 2.5 gigs of ram,

which is partitioned off for the OS and apps

and that kind of thing.

Now when you look at this it might not actually seem

super impressive, right?

We've got four times the CPU power,

we've got up to eight times the GPU power

compared to the Xbox One,

but we only have about double the memory.

In fact, even less if you compare to the Xbox One X.

However, there's actually one other thing here

which is helping to improve the memory story.

So you flip the board over

we'll see another major improvement,

which is the standard one terabyte SSD.

This is actually a big component of why the Series X

is able to be a big leap forward in a lot of ways.

So of course the previous generation

was bottlenecked by fairly slow hard drives.

It made sense back on the time,

but in 2020 we expect more speed,

and every Series X game also expects to have a SSD.

So this is a PCI 4.0 SSD.

It is, of course, been custom designed by Microsoft,

so it's actually fairly powerful.

It can pull almost four watts by itself,

which is part of the reason why it's

shielded and cooled in this sort of way.

But there's actually a couple of

very interesting things they're doing.

So first of all, like I said, all games expect to have

access to all this performance at all times, right?

So the CPU, the GPU they're all gonna sit

at that very consistent clock speed

and the same goes for the SSD.

So you're getting 2.4 gigabytes per second

pretty much period.

They've done a lot of optimizations, of course,

on the latency side, which is important

because you actually can pull stuff straight off of the SSD

straight to memory, so essentially it will kind of

expand that 16 gigabytes based on how developers use it.

But the, I don't wanna say downside,

but one of the things you have to consider

is that while, yes, you can plug in a USB hard drive

and play games off of that on the Series X

you can't play Series X games,

just simply because they expect that high level of speed.

So if you have your Xbox One games on a hard drive

you can plug in, it'll be just fine.

But if you want more than one terabyte of space

on your Series X you're gonna want one of these guys.

So this is a little Seagate expansion module.

So there actually were some rumors beforehand

about this little mystery port here which they

very cleverly not shown until this point.

Essentially that means that you can expand with another SSD

right into the back of the system.

It looks like a memory card,

but this is actually a full one terabyte SSD

which essentially gives you the exact same performance

of your standard SSD, and of course you can imagine

with that expansion port on the back,

maybe larger capacities,

maybe you could own a couple of these.

We'll see how expensive they are, to be fair.

So this next demo is of quick resume.

So to give you a little bit of context here

we're not gonna do any cuts here

to show you just how fast this is.

So I have a Series X controller,

I am playing on this actual Series X.

So right now I have "State of Decay" up,

or "State of Decay 2", rather, up.

You can see it playing on the Series X,

works just as you would expect.

However, say I want to, I don't know, play "Forza"?

Well if I switch over to it

you can see just how quick it's going to move.

So essentially in the background

it's saving "State of Decay" in its own VM.

So I can jump in and, look, I'm playing "Forza" now,

it's that fast.

Whoa, whoa, okay.

Well it might be that fast, I am not that fast. (laughs)

All right, hold on.

I'm gonna actually get back on the track here,

you can see "Forza" is running just fine,

and if I want I can jump over to, say, "Hellblade".

Again, you can see how fast it loads,

in the background it is saving my "Forza" game.

And, there we go, boom, I'm now into another game.

Now the cool part about this is that this is all saved