What's inside YOUR Xbox 360?

Okay, so you don't have your new Xbox 360 yet. No one does, after all, since they don't hit the market until next Tuesday.

But actually, some of gamer and gadget sites got their hands on a few (sadly, I can't say the same for those of us at CNET News.com). And one of those sites, AnandTech, decided to do something pretty interesting with their 360.

Sure, they could have plugged it in and played games on it. But that would have been soooooo conventional. No, these guys don't roll like that.

Instead, they decided to take a bunch of tools to the poor console and rip the thing apart to see what's inside.

Now, they didn't just smash and burn. Instead, they did this meticulously and documented just about every step of the procedure, from taking the outer case off, to removing the hard drive (included in the more expensive Xbox 360 premium), to taking the drive apart, to removing the heatsinks from the motherboard, to exposing the CPU, the GPU and the chipset and so on.

And at each step, they offer pretty pictures to show exactly what the Xbox should look like if you have deconstructed along with them--assuming you didn't break something along the way.

This is pretty geeky stuff, and I'm not sure I believe they can put it all back together without finding themselves with a few extra parts at the end. But if they can, I wonder if they might not be getting a job offer from Microsoft at the end of the day.

Regardless, these folks view their project as something of a public service. For that, I applaud them.

"The Xbox 360 launch is less than a week away," they wrote at the end of the last of the eleven pages the project fills. "So if you're eagerly awaiting one to be delivered, at least now you don't have to worry about taking yours apart - happy gaming!"