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When the Wii U's casing and overall form factor was first revealed, we had genuine concerns that Nintendo could be heading for its own RROD challenge. Microsoft and Sony's woes with excessive heat are a matter of record: the process of heating up the main processors during gameplay and then cooling them down when the console was turned off caused the lead-free solder connections to eventually break over time, disabling the hardware. Since then the platform holders have shrunk the main processors, making them cooler, more efficient and less likely to fail, but the form factor of the units is still fairly large.
Initial Wii U tech demos showed that the hardware offered similar performance to the current-gen consoles, but the form factor of the machine was even smaller than the "slim" versions of its competitors. Indeed, Wii U is even smaller than the recently released PlayStation 3 "Super Slim". Wii U has a lot more ventilation than its predecessor, but the space available for a heatsink and fan is much smaller than that of both Microsoft and Sony's offerings.
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