Amazon's Fire TV is the newest set-top box on the block, and even though it costs the same $99 as devices like the Apple TV and the Roku 3, Amazon has put a lot more hardware under the box's hood. Those other TV boxes have what they need to stream 1080p video, but Amazon obviously has hopes that the Fire TV will become the Android-based mini-game console that the Ouya has so far failed to be.

iFixit's standard in-depth teardown has a few more details for us than Amazon's product pages. The most important part is the Qualcomm-supplied SoC, which, according to iFixit, combines an Adreno 320 GPU and four 1.7GHz Krait 300 CPU cores. In other words, the Fire TV is powered by a Snapdragon 600 chip like the ones you'd find in last year's HTC One or Galaxy S4 . Amazon already uses a Snapdragon 800 in the latest Kindle Fire tablets.

We'll be able to do a deeper performance analysis in our (forthcoming) review of the Fire TV, but on paper, that Snapdragon 600 should be considerably faster than either the Tegra 3 found in the Ouya or the single-core Apple A5 found in the Apple TV. Since the chip doesn't have to share cramped quarters with a big screen or a warm battery, it should also throttle less aggressively than it would in a typical smartphone, allowing it to maintain peak clock speeds for longer periods of time.

This is good news for gamers, but we do take issue with some of Amazon's confusing ad copy. In its presentation and on the Fire TV product page, Amazon mentions the box's "dedicated" GPU, perhaps to evoke the visions of performance that a dedicated GPU in a desktop would provide. However, the Fire TV's graphics chip is no more "dedicated" than the GPU in the Apple TV or the Ouya or any smartphone—it's still integrated into the same processor die as the CPU, and both still use the same 2GB pool of 533MHz DDR2 RAM. The GPU is "dedicated" in the sense that it is "dedicated to the task of rendering images," but not "dedicated" in the way that most PC enthusiasts would use the term.

The rest of the Fire TV's specs are roughly what you'd expect: it features dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and 8GB of local flash storage. All of these components are on a single system board, and everything is cooled by one large passive heatsink. It's not likely that you'd need to remove the heatsink from the rest of the casing, but if you do, you'll need to heat up the glue that holds them together first.

iFixit also tore apart the Fire TV's remote control and Amazon's gamepad as well, but neither held any particular surprises. Most game controllers use external buttons that press down on rubber caps that then press down on circuit boards, and Amazon's pad works the same way. More important will be the way the gamepad feels in your hand, which we'll talk about in greater detail in our full review.

iFixit gave the Fire TV box a six out of 10 on its sometimes-arbitrary repairability scale, citing its simple construction, external power supply, and the use of Phillips head screws to hold it together as points in its favor. Detracting from its score was the sticky glue that holds the heat sink in place and the fact that all of the vital components are on one board—there aren't any moving parts in this box, but if one thing breaks, everything needs to be replaced.