The war between the three major consoles continues on. So far this year, Wii is winning the sales war, followed by XBOX 360, with PS3 trailing not far behind. We have already compared the PS3 and XBOX 360 from a game developer's point of view, and he favoured the XBOX 360 as well.
The most simple answer to the question is likely; "whose first-party titles do you like best?". If you're a huge Halo fan, you'll want a 360. If you can't live without Gran Turismo, the PS3 is for you. And for us Mario fans, the Wii is a must-have.However, there are a few other ways to compare these consoles. We'll be looking at various aspects throughout the coming weeks. Today, we're looking at power consumption levels of each console. Are any of these consoles power-hogs? Is the tiny Wii really that much more efficient than the big boys? Most likely the results of these tests won't sway your judgement, but they still may be interesting to look at.
Testing Methods
I wanted to test various aspects of each console - consoles aren't just about video games anymore. Now, you can watch movies, browse the web, and even have it download news when it is turned off. The following aspects were tested:
- Power consumption during video game playback - several games were played, and a sampling of 30 minutes of pure gameplay was used to determine the average, peak, and minimum power usage of each console.
- Power consumption during movie playback - The same 3 chapters of the DVD Pulp Fiction were played on each console. The data sample is taken from approximately the middle 30 minutes of that.
- Power consumption in the console - To test how much power these consoles use when at idle, each machine was left in its console mode, with no games or videos being played.
- Power consumption during standby - The consoles were left off, and power consumption was tested. The Wii was tested with Wii Connect24 both on and off.
To add more data, I also tested my personal PC in many of the tests, and added the Oppo DV-981HD for the DVD playback tests. The DV-981HD is a DVD player that upscales movies to 1080p, and we'll be reviewing it shortly.
The specs of the PC are:
- CPU: Intel Core 2 X6800
- Video Card: Foxconn GeForce 7950GT
- Motherboard: Intel DX975XBX
- Audio: Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty
- Memory: 4GB DDR2 6400
So it's not the most insane high-end gaming rig, but pretty capable of playing anything currently out there for the PS3 and XBOX 360.
As a side note, all tests were done at 220V, 50 Hz power, with the exception of the Wii which is connected to a step-down converter. When the step-down converter was used, the power meter was plugged into the converer, and the Wii into the power meter. This eliminates any extra wattage the converter uses from being a factor in these tests.
Power Usage in Games
First let's take a look at power consumption of all three consoles during video game play. I tried several games to find one that uses a good amount of power during play, but not excessively so. For the PS3, I used NBA Live 2K7. For XBOX 360, Gears of War was used. For Wii, it was The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and for the PC, PREY was used.
As I mentioned on the first page, games were loaded and played for at least 30 minutes, and the middle 30 minutes of data was used to determine the average, peak, and low wattage.
Quite a few numbers stand out from these results. First of all, look at Wii! 18 Watts average when playing what is considered the console's prettiest game! Compare that to the PC, which hovers around 198 Watts steady, peaking around 209 Watts.
While the PS3 had a lower minimum (probably due to the loading screen in between quarters in the basketball game), its average was about 13W higher than the XBOX 360 playing its most advanced game, Gears of War. GoW truly squeezes every little bit that the 360 has to give, and this is probably as much power any game today will require from it.
Here is how the power consumption of the XBOX 360 and PS3 looked over time:
The PS3 can also play HD content from other media such as its hard drive or flash media. It can play MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (PS, TS), MPEG-4 SP, and MPEG-4 AVC (h.264). The method of playing these files is a bit wacky at the moment.. It's not like you can just copy a file over to the hard drive and play it. The video must be a certain resolution and framerate, and has to be in a properly named directory on a flash drive, etc. It is recommended to use an automated video converter, at least until PS3 properly supports network streaming, etc.
The XBOX 360 can play WMV and WMV-HD. When using Windows Media Player 11, the XBOX 360 can stream these videos from any Windows PC, which is quite handy.
For these tests, we played 3 chapters from the DVD Pulp Fiction.
The most discouraging aspect of these results is how absolutely noisy the XBOX 360 is, even though it uses 50W less power than the PS3 to play a DVD. Together with incredibly poor deinterlacing, the 360 does not make a very good DVD player at all.
Unfortunately, I do not have the HD-DVD addon for XBOX 360, so we couldn't include HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray playback comparison. However, I tested power consumption of the PS3 under Blu-Ray playback, and the XBOX 360 playing a 720p WMV-HD video downloaded from the XBOX Live Marketplace. Not exactly the best indicator of performance, since HD-DVD will be using a different codec. But this is the best I can do for now.
Again, not the most important results, but it's interesting to note that the PS3 uses almost as much power to play a Blu-Ray movie as it does to play a HD video game. The XBOX 360 also uses a bit more power playing WMV-HD compared to playing a DVD.
The big peak at the end is from stopping the movie and going back into the console. This makes for a good segway!
Power Usage in Console
So we know how much power these consoles hog when playing video games and watching movies, but what about browsing around in the console? Both the PS3 and XBOX 360 support direct downloading of demos and games from their respective online services. Also, both work as music players (although I still haven't figured out how to stream media from a PC to the PS3).
We also threw in the power consumption results of the PC; basically it was just sitting in Windows, without any high load programs running.
How much power is being used when downloading all those demos and playing music?
Well if you were thinking of leaving your console on 24/7 I bet you'll be reconsidering that! You'd be spending hundreds of dollars each year to keep the PS3 going!
It is interesting to note that the PS3 (and PC) uses about the same power to play a DVD as it does to run the console, while the 360 uses 30 Watts more power to run the console as opposed to playing a DVD. The ever-efficient Wii continues to impress!
Power Consumption in Standby
Now here is something you can't avoid; power draw while the console is turned off. Don't expect anything significant here though; these results are included just to complete the article.
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.
Conclusion
So now you know approximately how much power the 3 new consoles consume. Some of the more interesting notes to me were:
- In video games, both the PS3 and XBOX 360 were relatively low compared to a mid-to-high range PC.
- The Wii is amazingly efficient, using no more than 18 Watts in any of our tests (although it really shows in visual quality in games)
- Both consoles are power hogs when it comes to playing movies.
- XBOX 360's Dashboard console is power-hungry (and slow). PS3's is slick and uses a lot of power, but no more than playing a DVD.
Neither the XBOX 360 nor PS3 really came out as a winner or loser when it comes to power consumption levels. The PS3 requires a bit more all around, but not much to write home about for now. Things may certainly change with future firmware updates (especially if either console adds DVD upsampling to the mix).
If you are really interested in saving the earth while getting your game on, get a Wii (just be sure to disable Connect24)
