Comment by lightedman
7 hours ago
"Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world"
Let me tell you, as someone that repairs a TON of XBox 360s, this comment is very, VERY wrong. The GPU isn't even the same revision between the same batch runs. Did you get Xenos? Zeus? Jupiter? That determined one set of things needed for install/refurbish. Is that a Valhalla motherboard in your hands? That just limited you to a very narrow and specific set of hardware you could utilize.
Oh and performance between all of those models varied WILDLY. Silicon lottery is a fucking JOKE on the XBox 360.
I'm not trying to disagree with you, I'm not too knowledgeable in this field. Even assuming what you said is true, I don't think it aligns with the public image of consoles. The general non-technical gamer doesn't know the difference.
There's a ton of differences that matter to refurbishing, no doubt. Different eMMCs, different chips on the board, different cooling needs, different board layouts, different ports, and more.
What really mattered to end users though was "this disc says Xbox 360. Can I put it in the box at home that says Xbox 360 and have the game run properly?" This didn't really matter if it was a Jasper motherboard or not. The game ran practically the same from a user perspective regardless of which board revision you had. I can go pick up any generation of 360 that still powers on and any 360 game off the shelf and it'll work pretty much how the developer intended.
Meanwhile, if you don't really know anything about computer specs, who knows if a game will run on your computer? This was a $3,000 gaming PC, it should run anything! I bought it in 2002 though, is that a problem? The Radeon 9700 Pro from that red GPU company, probably better than that Radeon RX9070 right? Bigger number and all, and after all its Pro. And its got 128 MEGA bytes, probably better than that other card's 16 something or other.