Among the many cool things that the Xbox One is capable of, is the ability to detect when it’s overheating. This thermal-sensitivity is quite a cool feature and one that we could use in a number of devices and appliances. The overheating is not because the Xbox One is not built properly but because of other external factors such as keeping it in a stuffy shelf or keeping foodstuff near it. What’s more is that besides detecting the heating the console manages to adjust itself in a manner to temper the degrees down. That’s really something! “We can’t prevent misuse of the product, but we can certainly anticipate it,” says Leo del Castillo, Xbox’s General Manager of console development. “The way we designed the box, we don’t actually intend it to ever have to go to maximum speed under normal environmental conditions. But there is overhead. So we’ll allow the fan to go all the way up to its maximum speed and if that solves the condition without the user having to do anything.”


This is really cool. What the Xbox really does is cut down on its power usage, albeit at the cost of performance, each time it senses overheating. “One thing that we have more flexibility with,” del Castillo says, “With the architecture of the Xbox One, is that we can dial back the power of the box considerably. We had a little less flexibility with the 360. And so basically, if we couldn’t dissipate the heat, there wasn’t a whole lot of leverage we could pull to keep the heat from being generated, so we had a limited amount of time before it just shut down. Xbox One can actually dial it back to a lower power state, so low in fact that it can in a mode that uses virtually no air flow.”

[Via – Gizmodo]