Next, the meat of this board sandwich—the aluminum center chassis.

Its main purpose is to soak up High-Performance Gaming Heat™ (hence the bright minty thermal compound for the SSD and storage expansion slot).

Speaking of storage: the Series X uses an m.2 2230 NVMe SSD, namely a custom 1 TB SN530 by Western Digital. We heard it's super-fast PCIe Gen 4.0, too—this is high-end stuff!

Its nice to see Microsoft using a replaceable drive here, even if software barriers prevent you from doing the replacing.

Let's take a closer look at the bits that give this SSD its oomph (ignoring a pretty boring back side):

SanDisk 60662 1T00 1TB NAND Flash Memory

SanDisk 20-82-10048-A1 NVMe SSD Controller

Qorvo (formerly Active-Semi) 90430VM330 Power Management IC