How did the Xbox One S get so much smaller? iFixit tears down to find out

Ars' review of the latest Xbox hardware revision, the Xbox One S, took a long look at the console's updated exterior (along with its 4K- and HDR-related upgrades). To get to know its guts, however, we turn to the teardown experts at iFixit, who went on a warranty-voiding dive on Wednesday to find out how Microsoft shrank the system a full 42 percent.

In doing so, the site's teardown team confirmed the myriad parts making up the full system, and as expected, we're getting the kind of change in parts vendors and component sizes we expected from a three-years-later hardware revision. For starters, iFixit shows off the Xbox One S' updated, shrunken power supply, which is now fanless, embedded in the system, and wedged nicely alongside the updated cooling rig—a custom-molded 120mm fan, an aluminum heat sink, and a copper heat pipe set.

The launch edition's 2TB hard drive can also be seen, and in good news, its interface has been upgraded from SATA II to SATA III. Our testing didn't reveal any particular drive-speed boosts as a result of this, which is probably because the included Seagate drive runs at 5400 RPM (with a 32MB cache), but we'll be curious to see whether the system's loading times are boosted when a solid state drive is hooked into that SATA III interface; if the Xbox One S' SATA controller is rated for SATA III, the difference could be noticeable. Anybody who tests this, however, risks voiding Xbox's hardware warranty.

Other interesting tidbits: the four major components mounted on top of the motherboard are numbered and set off with all-caps text (PWR, FAN, DISC, HDD); the disc-drive mounting component, attached to the system's new BD-UHD drive, has been slapped with a new Master Chief logo; the outer case eschews screws in favor of rigid security clips; the weird speaker that came built into the first Xbox One has been removed; and the system is still relying on a whopping 16 embedded DDR3 SDRAM chips to reach its full 8GB of memory.

As has already been reported, the system still uses a combined CPU+GPU chip provided by AMD, and iFixit has confirmed that its part number has changed. That's because its GPU clock speed has been boosted to 914 MHz, which has recently been confirmed to contribute to boosts in upcoming and older games. Otherwise, the CPU portion still consists of AMD's 8-core, 1.75 GHz Jaguar part.

Though iFixit complained pretty heavily about the security clips, the teardown guide otherwise gave the system a surprisingly high repairability rating of 8/10. That rating is carried by a "modular" system design but hampered by the fact that a hard drive replacement effectively voids the warranty.