Xbox 360 Models

[Barracuda]

Out of all the models out there which one do you recommend?

I'm thinking about picking up the Halo 3 360 but I noticed the hard drive is smaller. 20 gig should be enough room to save games though shouldn't it? I'm not interested in downloading games from the net for it.

[ganonbanned]

get a core and whip a hard drive in it.  I believe its possible.

[James]

It's possible but then it costs just the same as a premium but without all the extras.

Core - Pointless. SD Cable, Wired Controller, nothing else.

Premium - Wireless controllers, HD cable, 20GB Hard drive, Headset, ethernet cable

Elite - Premium but black, HDMI connection, 120GB hard drive

I don't know about America but here the 120GB hard drive sold separately is £130 which is an absolute rip off, just like £70 for the 20GB was.


Go for the premium if you don't intend to download loads of extras. The bigger hard drive is meant for the video marketplace where you rent HD movies by downloading them. You can't view them after the time you've paid for them, though.

[Tan]

get a core and whip a hard drive in it.  I believe its possible.

Not cost effective at all. A Core with a HDD separately is more than a Pro model, and you don't get a wireless controller like you do with the Pro.

It depends on if your a Halo fan or not. If your not, the new Pro's have HDMI and will save you $50. I have the 20 gig Pro and I have 12-13 gig left, that's after having 30 games saves, half a dozen XBLA titles downloaded and plenty of content for a dozen games or so. Keeping in mind that after format the HDD has 13-14 gig so all of that takes less than a gig.

[James]

The 20GB hard drive actually has 13GB of space, as Tan said. The other 7GB is from the cache and room for backwards compatibility patches, and the conversion between 20 gibibytes to gigabytes.

All hard drives are sold as X gigabytes when it's actually X gibibytes. A Gibibyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas a Gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, I'm not sure what the exact number of bytes is off the top of my head. So the 20GB hard drive is more like 18-19GB with some space saved for the cache, BC and system files.

For example, a hard drive sold as 160GB when formatted is only 150GB.

[Tynstar]

Get an Elite.

[ApolloBoy]

Core - Pointless. SD Cable, Wired Controller, nothing else.

How is it pointless? I play systems with wired controllers and SD video cables all the time, how is that bad? I honestly don't see why the Core needs to be bashed so damn much.

[James]

Because you need to buy something to save games on. (Memory card/Hard drive) Then the price starts going up and by then you may as well get a premium.

[Tynstar]

Wireless control is awesome. Hard drive is nice and needed if you want any downloaded content or games. I hate the Core because it brought down every other 360 model.

[Tondog]

Since you don't plan on downloading games from XBLA, I'd recommend the premium model. Or...better yet, wait until the rumored new core model is announced with a 256 mb memory card included.