Nintendo Wii Article

Nintendo Wii - Specifications

The Nintendo Wii is roughly the size of 3 DVD cases stacked together. It has a very sleek and compact look, one you might recognise from the SD cards it supports, with one corner rounded off. The actual dimensions of the Wii are 8.5" x 6" x 2". The Wii has a Slot-loading disc drive, (Blue light surrounds the drive when inserting a disc), the drive only plays 12cm Wii Optical Discs & 8cm Game Cube discs. There is talk of DVD & Audio disc support in future, via a software download, but at this time the Wii supports neither.

Nintendo worked with IBM to develop the CPU. Manufactured by IBM the processor is made with a 90nm SOI CMOS Process, this CMOS processor is capable of 729MHz.

The ATI Graphics Chip has had very little official Specifications released by Nintendo or ATI. The ATI "Hollywood" GPU is believed to clock up to 243 MHz with 88 MB RAM.

The Wii supports 480p(PAL/NTSC), 480i(NTSC) and 576i(PAL/SECAM). In both standard 4:3 and wide screen 16:9. With video signal output support for S-video, RGB SCART, Component, Composite and VGA.

Audio is standard stereo or Dolby Pro Logic II with an added bonus of a speaker built into the Wii Remote.

There is 512 MB of built-in flash Memory, a SD slot for expanded storage (up to 2 GB) and 2 Nintendo Game Cube memory card slots for Game Cube game saves. There is talk of future external hard drive Via USB connectors, but production costs is keeping this on the back burner for now. Also there is 6 kilobytes on the Wii Remote, which are connected via bluetooth, used for transferring Mii's and 4000 bytes used by some games to save information to a specific controller.

The external ports on the Wii are; USB 2.0(2), Game Cube controller (4), Game Cube Memory (2), SD card, Wi-Fi & MultiAV. Up to 4 Wii Remotes with an accessory port at the base.