Microsoft promised that the Xbox Series X would be available by this year’s holiday season, and they’ve finally announced the release date and official price of the next-gen console. Although players will have to wait a few months before the console hits the shelves, pre-orders are starting sooner than some may realize.

Both the Xbox Series X and its smaller, less-powerful counterpart the Xbox Series S will release on November 10th. Pre-orders begin almost two months earlier, however, on September 22nd. The Xbox Series X is priced at $499, exactly where estimates were pinpointing. Due to several key differences, however, the Xbox Series S is half the price of the Xbox Series X, at $299.

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With pre-orders set to begin in mid-September, players who plan on purchasing the console straight away will have to decide between the Xbox Series X and Series S. While the lower price tag definitely makes the Xbox Series S more attractive, there are several important differences between the models that may not make the low-price tag so enticing after all. In fact, the Xbox Series S may cost more money than expected down the line.

What’s The Difference Between The Series X & Series S?

A side-by-side comparison between the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles.

Essentially, the main differences between the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S lie in their processing power and storage. As its more compact design suggests, the Series S features a lower processing power than its more expensive counterpart. It’s impressively 60% smaller than the Series X and features no disc drive. While it supports ray tracing and features the same main chip, the Xbox Series S includes fewer teraflops of GPU. The Series X has 12 TFLOPS, for instance, while the less powerful model has only 4. The same goes for ram. Whereas the Series X includes 16 GB GDDr6, the Series S only has 10. It can also only manage 1440p at 60 frames per second, but the Xbox Series X is able to process 60 frames per second.

Storage is another big issue with the Series S. The Series X incorporates 1TB of custom NVMe. The Xbox Series S, however, has half of this with only 512 GB. It may only hold a max of 10 average-sized games between 40-50GB. This number will be even less for players wanting to download larger games over 100GB. Players who purchase the Xbox Series S will likely have to invest in external storage, like a hard drive, or subscribe to Microsoft’s xCloud, which allows players to access a variety of titles without needing to download the games, thus saving space.

With the official release date of the next-gen Xbox only a few months away, and the pre-order date even closer, consumers will soon have to decide if the Series S is a better alternative to the Series X.

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