Game Console Energy Usage Comparison

Broadband writes "Modern gaming consoles consume more and more power, dissipate more and more heat and cause a lot more noise with their cooling systems compared to their brethren a decade ago. While it's obvious that an Xbox 360 would have higher energy demands then a Playstation 1, the curious question is by how much? Even more importantly is the question of whether your console might be costing you money while you sleep. Preposterous you say? Actually quite the opposite! We put every console in our lab through rigorous testing to find the answers to these questions and see who the energy hogs really are. "

Comments

Embodied Energy

[Distinguished Hero]

A more interesting article would have covered how much energy it takes to actually produce each console (embodied energy).

From the thanks-captain-obvious! dept...

[RemovableBait]

Well really. We've taken 6 pages and a whole load of Google Ads to tell us that the PSOne uses least energy and the Xbox 360 uses most. Umm... I could've guessed that! Comparing the PSOne's power consumption with the 360 is a little crazy. Of course the 360 is going to draw more power to fire up its 3-core PowerPC CPU than the PS2's 295MHz processor!

I don't see the merit of comparing consoles from different generations for their power comsumption. Of course they need more juice... but they're doing a lot more with it. This article would have been interesting if the PS3 and Wii had been out, but with only the 360 available to examine, we don't really know too much about the true power usage of the next-gen systems. The 360 might be the most energy efficient... I'd certainly bet that the PS3's Cell processor and BD-ROM drive will use more electricity.

Also, they labour the point about the idle power consumption a bit much. If I had paid $500 for a 360 and games, I really wouldn't mind paying $2.63 a year for the convenience of using a wireless device (remote or controller) to turn the console on, and $20 per year is probably much less than my PC uses to run, never mind my kettle.

But above all, I especially love this bit:

We might unpack our Xbox 1 to play games on instead of backwards compatibility on the 360. Is double the energy worth anti-aliasing and a wireless controller?

Ummm, yes. They forgot that the $20 per year saves the moaning caused by the two consoles and associated controllers cluttering up the TV unit!

Nintendo 64?

[blues_shuffle]

Why didn't they test the N64? They have the Playstation and Dreamcast, both of which are from that era. Especially given that the Gamecube's energy consumption is so much lower than that of the PS2 or XBox, one would expect that they would test the N64. I wonder: are all Nintendo consoles more energy efficient than their contemporaries?

Apply the figures to people playing at once

[Midnight Thunder]

While the numbers apply to one console at a time, it is always worth seeing what these energy look like when you consider 500 000 people playing a time. The way I like to look at it is if a wind turbine provides 100KW of power, how many wind turbines do we need to satisfy the power demand. Taking the figures from the dashboard usage page. My math is:

      turbines = unit usage * 500 000 / 100 000

so at the highest end with xbox 360 (145W) we have 725 turbines and the lowest end the Playstation 1 (4W) we have 20 turbines. That is a huge difference in infrastructure needed to satisfy out gaming needs. I'll let you do the math for others.

I am not sure the amount of energy produced by an average nuclear power station or hydro dam, so if anyone can advise me on them I would appreciate it.

Power strips baby!

[bigbigbison]

I have my entertainment system on two power strips that it turn off every night and it hasn't affected any of them. The two things i do leave plugged directly into the wall is my old (pre-remote) tv and the cable box since both of them take a long time to restart once the power has been off. Other than that all the rest of the stuff remembers my settings. My dvd recorder doesn't keep the time, but i never use it as a timer, so it doesn't matter to me.
It may not save much electricity, but it is a habit I got into back in college when I lived in the dorms and I could hear everything humming in standby mode when I tried to go to sleep.