Wii U Teardown Exposes the Console's Naked Bits

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Nintendo on Sunday launched its Wii U console in the U.S., and though it's sold out at most places (good luck finding one without an inflated price tag), that didn't stop Anand Lal Shimpi from Anandtech from carving into his like a Thanksgiving turkey. He got his mitts on the 8GB Basic Set (a higher priced 32GB Deluxe Set is also available) and posted several pictures of what makes the Wii U tick.

To get inside the console, the first thing you have to remove is the CMOS battery door, Shimipi notes in his teardown. Next up are 8 more screws (9 total, including the battery door), a mixture of Philips and Tri-wing, after which you can slide the left side of the Wii U away from the front of the console.

The real geeky stuff takes place when digging down to the motherboard. That's where all the fun parts are located, such as four 4Gb (512MB) Hynix DDR3-1666 modules surrounding the Wii U's MCM (Multi-Chip Module), an IBM PowerPC-based CPU, and other parts. If Shimpi's math is correct, the Wii U boasts 12.8Gb/s of peak memory bandwidth, more than twice that of the original Wii console (5.6GB/s, excluding eDRAM).

Nintendo gave the Wii U its own web browser based on webkit. In Shimpi's testing, pages loaded "quickly and compatibility is surprisingly decent," though its SunSpider benchmark score of 2580.8 was on the high side compared to a sampling of smartphones.

Image Credit: Anandtech

Update

Our friends at iFixIt also posted a Wii U teardown, ultimately giving the console an 8/10 Repairability Score (the higher the score, the easier a product is to service at home). Check it out if you're into this type of stuff.

Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook



More...