Xbox Series X All-Digital Review: A small discount, same Xbox

There’s a new Xbox on the block. It features all the power of the existing Series X, but it’s white and drops the disc drive along with $50 from the price tag.

The new All-Digital edition still features 1TB of SSD storage space and all the same ports as the original Series X. It costs $599 and can support true 4K gaming and Xbox’s awesome Quick Resume feature. It’s up to you to decide if you want to grab this model, but for most, the price difference is so minimal that I think the choice will really come down to whether you want a white or black console.

Unless you want a disc drive, then you have no choice at all…

The inside of the console has been redesigned to include a new heat sync and some other changes to help it remain more power-efficient compared to the original that came out in 2020, but that’s not exclusive to the All-Digital edition. All of the Xbox Series X models built lately will have these changes. The most interesting change is that the chip inside the new one is built on a six-nanometer process, which allows it to operate at the same speeds while being more power-efficient and generating less heat.

Image source: Austin Evans

All of this is cool, and consoles very often switch to cheaper and more power-efficient parts midway through their lifecycle, so it’s not overly surprising. And at the end of the day, it won’t make a difference to people when they’re playing games. If you care about using electricity, the new models will draw less power, but it’s only about an 11-16 watt reduction in power while gaming, according to YouTuber Austin Evans.

OK, that’s interesting, so how’s it game?

I go through phases with gaming, and over the last few years, I’ve gamed on PC mainly because it gets access to more games than Xbox, and lots of PlayStation games make it there. I bought a used Xbox Series S to play Starfield while travelling, but after a few months, I resold it to my buddies since they game more than me, and I wasn’t really using it anymore. That left me with my aging Xbox One X, which I mostly keep around as a Blu-ray player.

My favourite thing about the Series X (and the Series S) when I had it was Microsoft’s awesome Quick Resume feature. This means that if you have it set so your Xbox will go into sleep mode when you’re not using it, you can jump right back into your games with zero loading time. Just grab your controller and turn on the console and game without waiting. It’s fantastic and a really great quality-of-life improvement for a console. It also lets you suspend up to three games at once, so you can bounce between multiple titles with ease.

This feature isn’t supported on all games, but in my experience, a good chunk do. You can also pin two games to always support the feature, so if you’re bouncing around and trying a lot of indie titles, your main play sessions in your larger games can stay in the Quick Resume hopper, so you don’t need to re-load them when you want to return to them.

I love the simplicity of the Xbox Series X design. It has great cooling out of the top.

When it comes to playing older Xbox 360 and Xbox One games, the loading screens are greatly reduced too. I remember that when I played Red Dead 2 on my Xbox One X, the loading screens would take minutes, and on the Series X, they took closer to 20-25 seconds. I’ve also been testing a Dolby Atmos surround sound system from Sonos (review coming soon), and combined with the Xbox Series X/S Atmos support, modern games that support the new-age surround sound system are incredibly immersive. Playing Forza and hearing the cars closing in behind you is really awesome.

I’d be remiss not to mention Game Pass. It’s an added cost, but it’s super fun to be able to check out all kinds of different games for one low price. It kind of reminds me of renting games from the video store as a kid. Everyone I know with an Xbox subscribes to it and loves it, so I really think Xbox is onto something here.

Is anything missing for a modern gaming experience?

There are a few things that disappointed me with the Series X. First up is the relatively slow networking modem. The Wi-Fi engine only supports 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) speeds, which is a standard from 2013. While it’s fine, it would have been really nice to have the box support something more modern like Wi-Fi 6E, which, in my experience, is much faster. The current speeds are fine for online gaming, but as games get larger and larger, it’s annoying to have to run an Ethernet cable across my living room whenever I want to download a game quickly.

Beyond that, the other disappointing thing is the proprietary SSD expansion cards. Microsoft could have easily added Thunderbolt ports to the console to allow for modern external storage that would support things like Quick Resume. The NVMe SSD inside the console only supports 2.4Gbps read speeds and 1.9Gbps write speeds (faster when compressed), which is well below even the transfer speeds of Thunderbolt 3, which can do up to 40Gbps. The only option for adding fast external storage is to buy an ‘Expansion card,’ but these range from $110-$275 in Canada, which can considerably raise the console’s cost. And most gamers will likely want one since the built-in 1TB of storage fills up super quickly. The model I’m testing has 1TB, and I was able to fit 14 games, with five of them being above 100GB each, two at 50GB, and the remaining are smaller titles ranging from 28GB to 1GB.

I’m a much bigger fan of the PS5’s option to insert an off-the-shelf SSD into the console, which gives you much cheaper and larger storage options. I truly think Microsoft could have come up with a better solution than the Expansion Cards, but it’s able to recoup more money using proprietary hardware, so it decided to go with that instead. It talks a big game about being able to decompress assets on the fly for faster loading, but even that caps out at 4.8Gbps, which is still well under modern USB specs, so I’m sure with more raw SSD speeds, a regular drive could deliver comparable performance.

The final thing missing from the All-Digital Series X is, of course, the disc drive. While I buy most of my games digitally, I have a pretty decent-sized physical movie collection since I find Blu-rays to be significantly nicer than online streaming from services like Netflix and Prime Video. Part of the reason I loved the Xbox One S and X was because they came with a 4K Blu-ray player inside, so for me, I think it’s worth it to spend the extra $50 on the disc-drive-equipped version of the Xbox Series X, but I know most of my friends don’t have any physical media, so this option would likely work out great for them, and they could put that extra $50 towards an Expansion Card for more digital storage.

An Xbox for the new-age gamer

There are five Xbox consoles on the market right now: two Series S consoles and three Series X. Personally, I think if you can afford it, most gamers will be the happiest with the 2TB Special Edition of the Series X since it offers the most base storage. I really think that many people will fill up their 1TB version quite quickly and then spend $200 on a 1TB expansion card anyway, which brings the price up to the same $800 that the 2TB Xbox Series X costs, plus with the 2TB version, you get a disc drive.

Obviously, you can make it work with a single terabyte model, but it will require a lot of downloading and uninstalling games as you want to play them, which is fine, but for someone like me who likes to switch between different games often, this really slows down my playtime. And I don’t have that much time to game anymore, so having to wait an hour or more for a game to download really takes a toll. If you are settling on a 1TB version, I’d recommend getting a refurbished model from Microsoft since it has a disc drive and costs $35 less than the new All-Digital option.

At the end of the day, once you settle into a game, the All-Digital Series X plays modern titles with the best of them. They look crisp, the frame rates are high, and when it works, Quick Resume lets you jump straight into the action. If you really just want a machine to play Call of Duty, Halo, Forza, or the upcoming GTA IV, this machine gets the job done with ease.

The All-Digital version is $599, the standard Series X is $649 ($564 refurbished), and the 2TB option costs $799.