By now most Xbox 360 fanatics know that Microsoft has released the latest version of the Xbox 360 which went under the code name of Jasper. We had a chance over the last couple of days to have some hands-on experience with the Jasper revision of the Xbox 360 and we wanted to share our impressions with you.

As most Xbox 360 enthusiasts know, the dreaded “red ring of death” (RRD) has been following the Xbox 360 around for a long time now; and has, in fact, affected Microsoft over the last four revisions of the Xbox 360. It seems that while each revision of the platform has improved the situation, it still has not totally put the problem to bed.

From the original Xenon and Zephyr revisions of the console, which caused Microsoft to extend the warranty of the Xbox 360 to three years for those affected by the RRD, as well as the later Falcon and Opus revisions, Microsoft has not been able to totally resolve the issue; but the revisions have lessened the failure rate.

The latest Jasper revision of the Xbox 360 moves the CPU and GPU both to 65nm, while the eDRAM stays at 80nm. In addition, Microsoft has done away with the 256MB memory card and added 256MB of onboard flash memory. Of course, with the move to 65nm for the CPU and GPU, the power requirements have dropped, which means the use of a new 150W power brick.

Getting a Jasper revision really isn’t that hard. Right now from our own personal experience the ones that we were able to locate were in the Arcade bundle. While some reports indicate that Jasper is starting to show up in Pro systems as well, we were not able to confirm that in our search. To date, the Jasper has not made its way to the Elite bundle as far as we know. However, we suspect as inventory is depleted and new consoles are manufactured the Jasper configuration will be the standard for all three bundles going forward.

The easiest way to make sure that you are buying an Xbox 360 Jasper revision is to simply look in the cut out window that lets you see the serial number of the console. If you look closely to the left of this cut out in the box, you can confirm that the unit is indeed a Jasper by looking at the markings for the current on the 12V rail. If below the UL logo it says: 12V-12,1A; 5V-1A then the box you have in your hand is a Jasper. The key is the 12,1A on the 12V rail. You may have to look very closely at the left hand side of the cut out to get this information, but it is the best way to confirm that you are buying a Jasper revision of the platform. Of course, we recommend against purchases of the 16,5A marking, which indicates the Zephyr revision, and it is the luck of the draw if you purchase one marked 14,2A which is the Falcon revision.

In our case, a new Jasper revision Xbox 360 was purchased to replace a Zephyr revision system that had already been replaced three times; and on the fourth failure, while the Xbox 360 itself worked fine, the DVD drive refused to read discs any longer. Of course, this was not covered by the RRD warranty extension, so instead of coughing up almost $105 and sending the unit in to have the DVD drive replaced, we just went ahead and replaced the unit with a Jasper $199 Arcade system, and used the content transfer tool to move everything from the old system’s 20GB hard drive onto the new system.

Our initial impressions are very positive. The system runs quite cool and the DVD drive in our new Jasper revision system was much quieter. In some of the testing we did as a comparison between the new Jasper and a Falcon system we found that Jasper was consistently cooler and not exhausting as much heat out the back of the unit as the Falcon system was.

In addition, doing some informal power consumption measurements, we found that the Jasper was using about 105 Watts on average, while our Falcon system was drawing around an average of 120 Watts. Based on what we have seen from other sources this does confirm that the Jasper is pulling less power when in use.

While we really don’t know how much tweaking has been done by Microsoft to the Jasper platform, no one is really talking specifics from the shadows beyond telling us that the move to 65nm on both the CPU and GPU is paying dividends in both reduction in heat output and less power required for operation.

Our initial impressions are positive and we have to strongly urge those considering an Xbox 360 console purchase to consider taking a little extra time and trying to find a Jasper if possible. While we can’t be assured that this will fix the Red Ring of Death problems altogether, we have to think that based on our first look at the Jasper that the shrinking of the dies coupled with the reduction in power consumption that Microsoft may have finally gotten it right with this revision.

While we have seen some Falcon and Zephyr units still on shelves, we have to suggest that you avoid them, as we think that the Jasper revision of the Xbox 360 could be the first trouble-free revision of the platform yet, but only time will tell if this is truly the case.