Microsoft's design for the Xbox One is intended to keep the console on—and quiet—for the console's entire 10-year life cycle, according to a report yesterday by Eurogamer.

The upcoming Xbox One appears to be larger than the Xbox 360 and significantly larger than the upcoming PS4. That "relatively voluminous piece of console hardware" allows for greater heat dissipation, with fan noise being "only noticeable during gaming when the AMD processor is really being put through its paces," Eurogamer reported based on anonymous sources. With a good heat sink and a relatively large fan that spins more slowly than a small one, the console is expected to be "almost entirely silent in standby and during its media functions," the report states.

Early versions of the Xbox One sent to developers were reportedly loud because a "thermal control algorithm—which monitors the heat output of the major chips on the motherboard and adjusts fan speed accordingly—simply wasn't implemented in the developing OS, and so to avoid damaging the hardware, the fans were set to 100 per cent all the time," Eurogamer wrote. This problem was resolved in a software update in March.

The fact that the Xbox One is designed to be always on had already been revealed. As we wrote in May, turning it off simply switches the machine to a "low-power state where it can download system and game updates and listen for certain Kinect voice commands."

The Eurogamer article has plenty of interesting details about how Microsoft is achieving this always-on state.