The chaps over at Llamma got their hands on the new Xbox 360 Elite and promptly tore it apart. There are a handful of interesting changes to the Elite's motherboard (not just the addition of HDMI) that include added epoxy around the GPU and CPU for support, less transistors around the CPU, new fan headers and more. Here's an excerpt:

Is it truly a 65nm core? I wouldn't put my neck out and say it is for certain but what little inspection we have done seems to point to a good possibility it is. When we get more time I would like to measure the power consumption of this unit verses the original box. Aside from removing the die from the wafer and measuring transistors with a microscope (yeah right) I don't know how we will know unless someone can confirm the revision information of the chip itself or Microsoft confirms.

One of the most important and sought after addition to the Xbox 360 Elite is the new 120 GB HDD. Finally some space to save all of the paid content your heart desires. We disassembled the drive and found a Fujitsu MHW2120BH 120GB drive inside. Our initial attempts at dumping sector 16 using The Specialist's hddhacker application was not a success. It appears that the tool does not yet support the new 120GB drive. Without the sector 16 you will not be able to upgrade your stock 20GB drive to 120GB the cheap way. We will keep you posted on any changes to this situation.

In our opinion the Xbox 360 Elite is the best value in gaming to date. Not only do you get the 120GB hard drive and HDMI port but Microsoft spares no expense and included a nice HDMI cable AND the original HD/SD combo cable. This truly was a surprise to see both cables included with the Elite and is very appreciated. The black case, controller and accessories are very sexy.

Not to mention that the pictures of the cores show no signs that it's even a different silicon version (all of the chips are identically sized, meaning no 65nm, and even the coupling capacitor layouts didn't change, which makes me think it's the same silicon revision, but without uncapping them you can't know for sure). The main differences between the two boards looks to be new inductors, a few less voltage regulators, smaller capacitors, and one chip change from a LQFP to a BGA module (the video scalar chip for HDMI support). Shame they didn't show the bottom side of the board...