Ethernet, powebricks... Money and heat
Now I promised we’d head around the front and we do that little further on but there’s two more bit back here we need to look at… one is the Ethernet port and the other is that whomping great power brick. Now ordinarily, that Ethernet port wouldn’t get a second glance… it’s just an Ethernet port, you plug a cable in and that’s it, right? Right. But that little socket suddenly takes on a whole new dimension when you take a look at the other option to using a wired connection. The Xbox 360 Wireless Bridge, to give it it’s official name might sound cool to wirelessly hook up to your network but seriously, do you want to bother?
Click for larger imageFor a start the damn thing is knocking in around £60 and although it supports 802.11 B and G as well as 802.11 A, that’s still hugely more expensive and vastly slower than buying a ready made length of network cable. Drill holes in the ceiling, hammer cable clips into the skirting board or knock down a wall for all I care but please just run the Xbox 360 over Ethernet… you will thank me for it later.
Now we come to the power brick. This has been blamed as the cause of many an Xbox 360 crash since the US launch and it’s not hard to see why… the thing is huge! It knocks in at a fair old weight too, so don’t go balancing it anywhere high in an effort to cool it or your loved ones might find you unconscious when it teeters off that window sill. It’ll be interesting to see how the UK gamers get on with it as we’ve suffered no problems at all. Obviously the thing runs a bit hot but if you lob something chucking out this much heat down the back of your telly where everything else from the telly, video, satellite box and DVD are all producing heat, you’re going to have a few problems.
Click for larger imageNeedless to say, compared with the rest of the Xbox 360, the power brick is one ugly lump of plastic and obviously built solely with purpose and not aesthetics in mind. Our suggestions are to try and place it on a smooth surface to allow air to flow around it as freely as possible. Snuggling it into your shag-pile carpet is going to be as sensible as sticking it in a bucket of water to keep it cool. It’s a dirty great transformer… it’ll get warm… be aware of this. Nuff said.
