First and foremost, the EBay listing itself was extremely vague about what was included in the sale. In fact, all that the seller mentioned was that he “expects people who know what it is to buy it…otherwise you have no reason to bid.” After successfully selling the “console” the seller said that the money would be used to purchase a new car for her/himself.

Quite frankly, the picture of the console looks just like any other ordinary tower PC. The hardware that is supposed to ship with the 720 is relatively standard for most sub-$1000 gaming PCs. The hardware underneath the rather ordinary looking case most likely includes the typical goodies including: An Ivy Bridge CPU, Nvidia GPU, a healthy bit of RAM, and a 64bit OS.

Until the buyers purchase is made public we can’t really be too sure about whether or not the item sold was in fact legit or just a clever scam. Any further information that is released will be posted ASAP.

[Ed – although we can never know for sure unless the buyer makes this public this Durango system could be a virtual development platform. Some companies are getting away from sending out actual hardware and are instead providing virtual appliances to for developers to perform their work on. It makes things much easier if there are changes to hardware builds or firmware revisions. All you have to do is replace the virtual device instead of an entire system. We are pretty certain that any software emulation to act as an Xbox would be custom written by Microsoft as would the virtual machines installed on it. This is probably where the money comes from. You can learn a lot about the device from a virtual appliance simply by looking at the abstraction layer and the hardware emulation layer. We are actually surprised that Microsoft has not stepped in at this point, but that could happen after the money changes hands.]

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