Introduced on April 29, 2007, the Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite, as its name implies, is the top of the line in the Xbox 360 series of consoles. The 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft, its major competitors are the Sony PS3 and the Nintendo Wii, and it's the only console on which the extremely popular Halo game franchise is available.

The Elite comes only in black — distinct from the white of the other models — with a 120-gigabyte hard drive, a wireless controller, a headset, and an Ethernet network cable. In addition to the composite cable connection available in all Xbox 360 models, the Elite comes with an HDMI port and HD cables. Later versions of the Pro model have this too.

Apart from those small distinctions, the Xbox 360 Elite is essentially the same console as the Xbox 360 Pro. It comes with one-month trials of both a gold Xbox Live membership and Netflix Watch Instantly.

On August 28th, 2009, the Xbox 360 Elite's price was cut to $299.99 — the old price of the Pro model. The Pro model will be phased out. Leaked photos of the cheaper Elite's packaging don't list HD cables in the contents of the package, though.

If you're upgrading from a standard 360 console we've embedded the instructional video from Microsoft on how to perform the hard drive data transfer in the Continued Contents section.