Scorpio upside-down

19 Apr 2017

I haven’t see anything turn up on any news sources I read about this, so I thought I’d writing something.

If you’ve been following any of the Project Scorpio coverage you’ve seen the shots of the production motherboard and were probably wondering how big this thing is. So I decided to grab a picture of it and the motherboard from the Xbox One S and compare them, which is when I realised something weird. The ports are back-to-front.

Scorpio motherboard comparison

If you look at the port layout of the XO-S it goes (from left to right); HDMI out, HDMI in, USB, USB, IR, S/PDIF, Ethernet.

However the Scorpio board is (again from left to right); Ethernet, S/PDIF, IR, USB, USB, HDMI, HDMI.

Normally this wouldn’t be anything important, but Microsoft have said on record that the port layout is the same:

‘On the rear of the unit, the arrangement of ports is identical to Xbox One S, including the standard figure-eight power socket (as opposed to the much larger ‘kettle’ cable arrangement used on PS4 Pro). The thinking here is that those who’ve plumbed their Xbox One S into their AV set-up can swap over to Scorpio with next to no effort.’ [ Eurogamer - Project Scorpio Tech Revealed ]

And this means?

The assembly shots we’ve seen are all upside-down. The ‘top’ of the motherboard, where the APU sits, is actually the bottom.

If you look carefully at the HDMI ports you’ll notice that the retaining springs we can see are very close together, almost like they’re using an inverted connector rather than the standard one.

For more confirmation you can look at the pictures of the dev kit in Gamasutra - Inside the next Xbox: Project Scorpio and its brand-new dev kit. Here you can see the optical drive on the bottom left of the console, from the front view, while the assembly picture on (Eurogamer’s Project Scoprio Hardware Deep Dive)[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-project-scorpio-hardware-deep-dive] shows the drive on the top left.

Oh and to get back to the original reason for looking at the images, using the USB/HDMI ports as a common scale, the Scorpio’s motherboard is about the same size as the Xbox One S.

Nothing that exciting, but an interesting design choice that no-one else seems to have noticed.

Extra References