Game Console Energy Usage Comparison 364
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. "
PSone PStwo ? (Score:3, Informative)
Playstation 1 4W
Playstation 2 23W
Xbox 61W
Xbox 360 145W
Gamecube 20W
Dreamcast 17W
"Last Updated: 6/18/2006" and no PSone and PStwo figures ? hmmm...
Re:From the thanks-captain-obvious! dept... (Score:5, Informative)
??? I can get you an ARM board that'll be three times as fast as a Pentium 90, but use barely a fraction of the power.
Believe it or not, computer equipment *is* getting more efficient. The problem is that massive amounts of power are being dumped into them for "maximum performance". Shades of Alpha?
Re:Dreamcast (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
A couple of watts when off... (Score:5, Informative)
The catch is this--the "off button" doesn't really turn the cable box off, because it wants to keep processing the program information data ("Friends is on channel 7 at 7:30) that's being trickled down the cable, that requires the tuners and microprocessor and such to be on, leaving little difference in power use for the cable box between "on" and "off". This means that, when I turn the TV on, it can be 10-20 minutes before I have a fully populated program grid.
Re:PSone PStwo ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apply the figures to people playing at once (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Apply the figures to people playing at once (Score:3, Informative)
And the astute observer would note that I didn't add in the factor of 1000 for going from kilowatt to megawatt. So that's 1/50 of a Hoover Dam for xbox 360 and 1/1000 for PS.
Meh, it's Sunday morning...
Re:Odd... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Standby Energy Usage (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, it would be 1.8 terrawatt hours (assuming the same rate of usage). 1 W = 1 J/s. "An annual leak of 1.8 terawatts" makes about as much sense as "an annual distance traveled of 180 km/h." For the record, 1 kWh = 1000 W * 1 h = 1000 J/s * 3600 s = 3600000 J = 3.6 megajoules.
And what's the impact on the environment of generating that energy?
A lot smaller than the impact on the environment of having all those fatcats in Hollywood living their lavish lifestyle. A lot smaller than the impact on the environment of people in third world countries having 12 children per family (especially after a few generations, after exponential growth takes place e.g. in 3 generations: 12^3=1728 vs. 1.3^3=2.197 (approximate average European fertility rate -- children per woman)). A lot smaller than a lot of other things you don't seem to care much about.
Re:Dreamcast (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Many holes in this "research"!: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Odd... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Math (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.google.ca/search?hs=IDf&hl=en&safe=off
Re:Damn Terrorists (Score:3, Informative)
> off the East and West Coast as well as in Alaska.
Funny, the US gets more of its oil from Canada than Saudi Arabia, and the trend is only increasing:
http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/can-am/washington/tr
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/canada.html [doe.gov]
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
The point is that when people do turn the damn thing off, it still draws power and the only way to avoid that is physical disconnection from the electrical supply.
Worryingly, this not only applies to consoles, but PCs and monitors too.
I measured the power some PCs were drawing in their "off" state - not hibernation, or suspend-to-RAM, or what-have-you, but "off". A recent Athlon 64 drew 19W; a 2001 dual Athlon drew a whopping 30W! The two monitors I tested in their "off" state (certainly not standby or sleep) drew around 7W.
In fact, the power supplies themselves are partly to blame. I reached round the back of the machines, flicked the PSU power switches to off so that (presumably) nothing was being used by the motherboards, and they still drew 9-12W!
This isn't about leaving things on standby or low-energy states. It's about "off" not meaning "off" anymore.
Re:Errrrum (Score:5, Informative)
When the PS1 was first released, it probably used a lot more power than when they re-released it several years later. If they were to build a PSone today using the very latest technology, it would probably consume less than a Watt at full tilt.
Re:Dreamcast (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PC energy usage ... consoles are looking effici (Score:3, Informative)
note: with the monitors off, everything pulls about 280 watts
How about a PC? (Score:3, Informative)
source: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=271
Re:power costs (Score:2, Informative)
California Electric highest in the western world? (Score:3, Informative)
WOW!
That's just under $3 per watt per year.
A 200watt fileserver for instance is $600 a year to keep running.
A 120watt torrent machine is $360 a year to keep online (plus cost of cable/dsl modem).
Most network routers and switches cost more in a couple years of electric use than their purchase price.
Re:Odd... (Score:1, Informative)
Japanese apartments are lit by 15 and 20W flourescent tubes, and a small incandescent lamp at 5W. "Low-power" then is likely to be 20w or under, probably around 5. Electricity here is fairly expensive, so it won't be like running an XBox 360 full time.
Re:PC energy usage ... consoles are looking effici (Score:4, Informative)
Those numbers are meaningless marketing. Power supply manufacturers keep increasing them to make their supplies sound more powerful, but the reality is that they're just finding new (unhelpful) ways to add up the numbers and get a larger figure.
Fundamentally, you cannot describe the power consumption of a PC PSU using a single number. There are too many variables. You *can* describe the drain of an assembled, running PC at a given point in time using a single number, but the only connection it has to the PSU 'rating' is that it will definitely be smaller. You'll find some more informative numbers printed on a sticker on the power supply, telling you the peak drain for each of the rails, but what really matters is the power consumption of all the devices in the computer.
In practice, these '800W' power supplies that you see today are just half a dozen rails (at varying voltages), each of which can supply a peak current of between 100W and 300W. Most of them cannot supply peak current to every rail simultaneously. People upgrade their power supplies to handle high-end video cards and think this means they need to consume 800W instead of 300W. It doesn't. It means that one of the rails supplying their video card needed to handle 200W instead of 150W, or something on that order. Overclockers rarely need a larger amount of power, they need a more expensive power supply that puts out smoother voltage when a noisy load (overclocked CPU) is applied. Etcetera.
So sure, we may soon be needing power supplies that say '1200W' on the box. But that doesn't mean they will consume 50% more power than one that says '800W'.
Re:Damn Terrorists (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, there have been at least three publicized core events: the Idaho Falls failure, TMI, and Chernobyl. Of the three, only Chernobyl proceded from full core failure to melt-through. That was due to the poor engineering behind the Russian plant, not to the intrinsic danger of a core event.
For a sense of what is possible, the French SuperPhoenix and Canadian CanDu reactors have combined for millenia of event-free operation. France, by the way, depends on nuclear power for 80% of its electrical needs -- the French are chuckling over the current energy price crunch...all the way to the bank.
Furthermore, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl is by no means "uninhabitable" when you get more than about 200m from the sarcophagus itself. Ukraine has taken a very reasonable precaution of maintaining the evacuation, but the area is completely habitable, as demonstrated by the variety of animal and plant life which has taken up residence there.
I'm still worried about the viability of Yucca Mountain, and feel strongly that we need a non-proliferative reprocessing technology before the US adopts nuclear power completely -- but don't deceive yourself about the its problems. They're nowhere nearly as bad as you think, and the mass poisoning coal inflicts on children, in particular, is far worse than you imagine.