How Green is my Gaming System?

Posted by admin on November 20, 2008

Green Gaming Guide

T’is the season for video gaming systems.  Will it be a new PS3 or maybe an Xbox 360 or the ever-popular Wii?  What are the options for an energy-minded household? Any new video gaming system that is plugged into the wall will affect your energy budget.

Not only will you plunk down a fortune for the video gaming system and the additional  “Got to Have Games” you will also see it on your utility bill, if your are so unfortunate as to still have a utility bill. “Not that there is anything wrong with having a utility bill.”

We at GTM love our gaming systems, but wanted to know how much energy they took to give us the hours of mind-numbing entertainment we have come to enjoy.

Get ready for Shock and Awe!

The contenders are:

The Sony PS3

197 watts per hour (On)
Stand by is 1W, but when put into Remote Play, standby mode, the power consumption jumps to 24W per hour.  That means the PS3 is using 576W per day of electricity without your even turning it on!  So, if you play your PS3 three hours a day on average, this would amount to 1095 watts a day. That is 1 kilowatt of power usage.  If you are on solar power, you would need 2 extra solar panels at a cost of $1100 each to power your PS3. Yikes! This is like having ten 100 watt light bulbs burning 24 hrs a day.

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Xbox 360

The Xbox 360 is not much better.  It uses 187W during play and consumes 14W in standby mode. The Xbox 360 daily energy consumption is rated at 855 watts per day. You would only have to add one additional solar panel to your system to be able to frag your heart out.

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The Big Winner in the Gaming System Energy Consumption Department is….. drum roll please…

The Nintendo Wii

It consumes a paltry 19 watts while in play and 1 watt in standby mode.  That comes to 78 watts a day. What a difference a gaming console can make on your energy bottom line.

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For those of you still enjoying older gaming systems, we wanted to see what the Sony PS2 and Xbox and Dreamcast did on the energy rating. We liked what we found.  The PS2 and the Xbox both came in at around 60W each while the Dreamcast came in at 17W.

Most of the top games come in a PC format.  The average PC uses 78 watts and the monitor uses around 35 watts.  With today’s computing power, you might think twice about adding a high-end gaming system to your energy budget.

* Note* If you have a PS3 or an Xbox 360 check there power-saving auto-shutdown features, they are turned off by default.