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PS3 8x More Power Hungry Than PS2

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hungry-beast dept.

MonsieurCreosote writes "The Playstation 3 apparently demands eight times as much electricity as the Playstation 2, and more than twice as much as the Xbox 360. It also consumes much more power than a top-end PC gaming rig. It's not clear what's causing the massive drain, but Sony is now denying reports that the PS3 experienced overheating problems at the Tokyo Games Show last month. From the article: 'While an Intel Core 2 Duo PC with high-end graphics card chews politely on a 160 watt entré, the PlayStation 3 gorges itself on 380 watts... The extra power consumption of the PS3 over the PS2 suggests that we're not really getting much better at designing efficient systems, we're just pumping more 'fuel' into existing paradigms'. Are modern console hardware designers getting sloppy?"

3 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Green tax by NineNine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No we don't need another tax. It's called the power bill. You pay for it there. WTF is a "tax" going to accomplish, other than fattening the pockets of politicians, complicating our unbelievably complicated beuracracy even more, and making the poor even poorer?

  2. More power != Less efficient by dextromulous · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The extra power consumption of the PS3 over the PS2 suggests that we're not really getting much better at designing efficient systems
    With the PS2 at 6.2GFlops and the PS3 at 2.18 TFLOPS you're looking at about a 350x performance increase (yeah, I know flops aren't exactly meaningful, but its the only metric I can see right now.) In order for the PS3 to be "less efficient" than the PS2 it would need to consume over 15kW!
    --
    There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
  3. TFA is wrong... by ivan256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you dig down through the four layers of links to the original source, you will see that they came up with the 380 watt number by multiplying the amperage number with the wattage number on the power supply label. That gives you the peak draw that the power supply is capable of, and probably not even close to average consumption.

    I have a 600 watt power supply in my PC, but even when I'm gaming it drinks in only 250 or so watts of power. The only time it gets even close to the 600 watt mark is for a fraction of a second after power up. I'll bet the PS3 only comes close to 380 watts for about the same amount of time right after powerup.