Xbox Series S Review: I Take Back What I Said!

[Music] hello and welcome back to another video so i took a long time to review the series s because this console is truly very hard to evaluate it's not as much of a next-gen upgrade as the ps5 or xbox series x but it nonetheless is a next-gen upgrade as you likely know the series s costs 300 at retail and it has 364 gigabytes of usable storage with no disk drive it's clearly the entry level next gen console you could get this series s a two terabyte hard drive and a 144 hertz monitor all for the price of around the series x and i know this because that is the setup i was using when i was playing most of my series s games for this review i'm going to focus mainly on the value proposition of the series s and the gaming performance you get for that money so if you want a more in-depth review regarding things like the controller the ui the xbox ecosystem and a couple other things then head over to my series x review where i go into more detail but we will brush over those things anyway so for example the controller on the series s it's the same xbox series controller that we've seen all along it's a refinement of the previous gen which is why you can use your xbox one controllers on the series s so if you were an xbox one owner for example this is a nice little perk the xbox ecosystem consists of the controllers the large backwards compatibility library and more so if you've spent a lot on the xbox ecosystem like games and everything then the series s might be what you're looking for if you don't want to spend too much more the ui is also something that many xbox users would be very familiar with since it's so similar to what they've experienced in the past i personally do like the amount of customization in the xbox ui even if it didn't change a whole lot from the previous gen now with all that said let's talk about the games the series s is undoubtedly a nice xbox game pass device it plays basically all the non-enhanced backwards compatibility games very well and we will talk about overall performance very soon there's currently a large amount of games and backwards compatibility and in the future you can expect it to play all the next-gen games okay i want to take this moment to talk about the design the xbox series s is the smallest console microsoft has ever made and that's truly impressive given that it is a next-gen console there won't be a single person complaining about the series s fitting in their setup unlike the ps5 or the xbox series x in addition the series s basically runs just as quietly as the xbox series x and it seems like that fan is doing a very good job all right i promise performance is the next category we will talk about but let's discuss storage first because that is important we've already discussed that there's 364 gigabytes of usable storage on the nvme ssd but there are a lot of expandable storage options for the series s even if you don't want to buy microsoft's proprietary storage expansion ssd you can buy an external ssd or an external hard drive or even cheaper which i know many series s owners who are wanting to save money might go look for since the ssd runs just as fast as the one on the series x we experience those extremely fast load times that make it feel like a huge upgrade from last gen plus we have quick resume which is one of my favorite next-gen features on any of the consoles and finally the velocity architecture is still on the series s like the series x and that will account for more things than just storage microsoft may have marketed the series s as the 1440p console but i think 1080p 60fps is the sweet spot for the capability of the series s which is partially why i used a 1080p 144hz monitor the gpu in the series s is still quite capable given it's basically full rdna 2. meaning the series s is able to do next-gen features like variable rate shading and ray tracing the series s is capable of native 4k in a few games but it will be mostly upscaling to 4k if a game is compatible in 4k but what is most important to all of this is that the developers of games are the ones who are going to be basically deciding if the series s is going to perform as well as it could on paper per se and here's what we're seeing so far in a lot of games and my results are from myself and what i've seen from digital foundry ghost recon breakout has no 60fps version on the series s but it does on the series x hitman 3 runs flawlessly at 1080p 60fps on this series s but it doesn't have the same shading or textures on the series x jedi the fallen order has many gpu related dips at 1080p 60fps the medium doesn't have ray tracing support for the series s so given a lot of these are older devs could optimize for the series s in the future for its hardware and that's likely what we'll see now my experience is a slightly different story i found a lot of games to run very well and the overall gaming experience itself was very enjoyable still fortnite at 120 fps just felt so good and truly next gen i ran dirt 5 and it played very smoothly but it doesn't look as nice as it does on my ps5 halo 5 and control were also solid experiences overall and finally i just want to say that due to the velocity architecture with the zen 2 cpu i don't think we'll be seeing as many factors holding games back as they may have in the past now with all that said who should buy a series s if you're a casual gamer you'll be seeing nice next gen upgrades at a good price especially if you're coming from a base ps5 or xbox one if you're someone who plays sports games the series s plays a lot of those very well and i don't think you'd necessarily need a ps5 or xbox series x if you're looking to play high refresh on games like fortnite mainly then the series s will play those just as well and you'll likely want a 1080p 144 hertz monitor anyway to save a lot of money then of course anyone on a budget will surely be happy with this device or if you want a secondary console then the series s would make a very good option like i said in the beginning this was truly a very hard console to evaluate because my initial feelings just said buy the series x or ps5 because they're much better consoles however after using this my feelings on the series s have changed and i think a lot of people are going to be happy if they go for the series s so thank you so much for watching please subscribe if you're new and peace

Channel: Adam Reviews Tech

Views: 132,969

Rating: 4.7776051 out of 5

Keywords: Xbox Series S, Series S, Xbox Series S Review, Series S Review, Series S Long Term Review, Series S Gaming Experience, Series S Gameplay, Xbox Series X Performance, Xbox Series S vs. Series X, Best Budget Console, Best Budget Console 2021, Buy Xbox Series S, Xbox Series S Worth It, Series S Expandable Storage, Budget Next Gen Console

Id: 3fRRfEk3EtI

Length: 7min 16sec (436 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021

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