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Fat energy bill from playing your shiny new Xbox360?

Mon, 06/19/2006 - 2:58am — Mark Vergeer

Nuclear power plantNuclear power plantDX Gaming has posted a nice article the compares the power consumption of today's and some of yesterday's consoles.

Just leaving the console on standby consumes quite a bit of power, with the xbox360 costing about $2.63 a year. Just displaying the 'dashboard' shouldn't be as processor intensive as running games, but the difference in power consumption between those states turns out to be surprisingly small. Both the Microsoft consoles can easily compare to a very bright lightbulb - 61W & 145W - when running the dashboard. Respectively 70W and 165W playing games.

Extrapolating to a yearly cost, the shiny new xbox electricity consumption should cost you around $20.10 per year. Ah, the French with their Nuclear powerplants all around will laugh at this - the plants make their electricity very cheap.

A very interesting read, just to save some energy I'll go play a game of scrabble with my girlfriend. Er... "poweringup", is a verb my dear.... :)


Comments

Mon, 06/19/2006 - 9:53am — Matt Barton
Matt Barton's picture

Vampires

I've been hearing about the laws banning vampires or all those devices that continue to suck energy while in standy modes. The worst culprits are usually power bricks, which continue to burn energy even when there's no device attached to them. As I understand it, it wouldn't cost the manufacturers very much to add a switch or automatic detect/shut-off type option, but in their quest to cut cost to the minimum, they've been skipping it.


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