Xbox 360 Elite gutted

Though it won't officially be on store shelves for another nine days, the Xbox 360 Elite has already apparently been purchased, spirited away, and gutted. Minnesotan tech blog Llama.com is posting pictures of of what it claims is a disassembled Elite. And, other than the HDMI output and 120GB hard drive, its silicon entrails apparently aren't much different from those of a standard Xbox 360.

According to Llama.com, the Elite it disassembled has the same noisy Hitachi DVD drive as many older 360s--not the quieter BenQ drives found in several newer batches of the console. The site was also unable to tell if the console's CPU was made using the larger 90nm processor or the more energy-efficient 65nm processor, which is supposed to be introduced later this year.