What's under the hood? (image credit: AnandTech)

Are you curious about what's inside the Wii U? Users across the web have been discussing the system's technical specifications for months, but now that it is finally available in North America, many folk are seeing first-hand what Nintendo has to offer.

However, few (if any) observations are as thorough and detailed as tech specialist Anand Lal Shimpi's Wii U teardown. By taking the system apart piece by piece, as well as putting it through its paces, Anand has revealed a few interesting nuggets about Nintendo's latest system. He even goes on to say how you can do it yourself (although we recommend that unless you really know what you're doing, you should probably just stick to enjoying those exciting new gameplay experiences).

One of the most interesting discoveries relates to the system's memory bandwidth which, at a peak total of 12.8GB/s, isn't too dissimilar to the Nexus 10 or the iPad 3/4. While this may not sound particularly impressive, it's worth noting that both the Wii U's CPU and GPU have a good amount of eDRAM at their disposal. Also, the system's power consumption seems pretty level across the board, with the Wii U menu consuming almost as much power as playing New Super Mario Bros. U does.

There's a mother lode of parts on this motherboard (image credit: AnandTech)

As we have reported previously, the Wii U web browser was also tested and performs relatively well for a home system.

Have you dared to break the sacred seal on your Wii U system and take a look inside? Or are you too dazzled by the glorious HD visuals to care? Share your experiences with us below.

[source anandtech.com, via destructoid.com]