The Next-Gen Consoles and Power Consumption

Ant writes "This HardCOREware review reports that the current video game console war takes an interesting twist as the power consumption levels of each of the three new consoles (Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 3 (PS3), and Microsoft Xbox 360) were explored. Video game playback, DVD playback, and other console functions were tested. One of the most interesting stats were the console idle power usage: 'Wii - 1.3 watts, Wii (Connect 24 On) - 9.6 watts, Xbox 360 - 2.5 watts, PlayStation 3 - 1.9 watts. Nothing significant here; you're looking at spending about $0.20 USD a month to keep the PS3 plugged in, which isn't much. The Wii requires 10 Watts to run Connect24 (which will connect to Nintendo's online service and notify you of system updates) racking up a cost of about $1 a month which is nothing too significant, but still about 5X more than if it were just turned off. Turn Connect24 off, and it's back down to normal.'"

Comments

USB Power?

[Blakey Rat]

How much of the Xbox idle power consumption is keeping the USB ports powered to charge Play&Charge wireless controllers? Could you reduce the power by unplugging the USB cable of your controllers when done, or would that have no impact? Anybody know?

According to my Kill-O-Watt meter

[maynard]

My Xbox 360 consumes:

~2 watts while turned off

~130 watts while idle at the xbox live dashboard

~165 watts while playing Gears of War

These meter readings do not include the display device (obviously)

Re:Two things

[AKAImBatman]

Do you consider your television to be "off" when you press the power switch? That's the exact same state as the Wii is in. It barely trickles power in that state. If you want your electronics to be in a powerless mode (fairly unnatural for modern electronics) you need to either find the cutoff switch (like on the PS2 or the power supply of most PCs) or pull the plug.

Re:Power drain

[AKAImBatman]

10W x 1 person isn't much. 10W x several million is.

5,000,000 Wiis * 10W = 50 megawatts

From this link (sorry, the only one I could find for power output rather than watt/hour consumption):

It is estimated that the present rate of US energy consumption - for ALL purposes - is about 3.345 Terawatts.

By those estimates, 50 megawatts is only 0.0015% of the national power output. (And I'm counting consoles that aren't in the United States.) If we assume that the Wii will become as popular as the PS2 was (37.1 million units in the United States alone), we come up with 371 Megawatts, or about 0.011% of national power capacity.

Now let me throw some other figures back at you. The PS2 slurps about 45W to play games and DVDs (x37.1 million), the GameCube drinks about 40 watts (x12.7 million), and the XBox is estimated to gulp about 100 watts to play (x24 million). Standby power* for the XBox is 6 watts, 2 watts for the PS2, and 0.4 watts for the GameCube. During gameplay, the last generation of consoles were using:

(37,100,000 * 45W) + (12,700,000 * 40W) + (24,000,000 * 100W) = 4,577.5 megawatts

during playtime, and:

(37,100,000 * 2W) + (12,700,000 * 0.4W) + (24,000,000 * 6W) = 223.28 megawatts

If you were to take the average gameplay and DVD watching time of each console and work out the figures, do you think that replacing all of the existing consoles with Wiis would increase the overall power usage, or decrease the overall power usage? Some back-of-the-envelope figures of my own suggest that using nothing but Wiis would save power over the current situation. So I repeat, 10 watts is nothing.

* Based on web searches. Actual values may vary.

Power Requirements

[problemchild]

I'm always a bit dubious about power requirements. I think the PC requirements given are a little on the high side.I have measured several of my own systems(with a plug in watt meter!) all of widely differing specs and get:

1GHZ Mini ITX board based firewall with 2.5" drive 25-29W
3GHZ Seperon Board with 2GB of RAM and 2xHDD and DVD 77-109W
Athlon 3200 with 4GB RAM and 17xHDDs !!! 255-289W continuous 480W startup peak
19" LCD 35W

Either I have magically frugal computers or people's measurements come from reading off the rating of the PSU

Re:Why is wiiconnect24 required?

[DaSH Alpha]

More importantly, why is the Weather info often 5 hours or more old? I think they should find a better provider... Also very annoying, is that even with WiiConnect 24 on, there have been a few times when I access the weather or news channels and it says it needs to update. Um, if it's supposed to be on all the time, won't it always have the latest info assuming I don't have internet connection issues? Plus, why is the Wii Shop channel dirt slow? It's really annoying. Oh well.