Eric Hittinger is a PhD student and researcher in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He’s also a gamer and Destructoid reader. His feeling was that the Wii isn’t necessarily ‘greener’ than any other of the game consoles when it came to power consumption. This all led to his latest paper, “Power Consumption of Video Game Consoles Under Realistic Usage Patterns.” In this he found that the Wii really isn’t a lightweight when it comes to power consumption. Here’s one of the biggest take-aways from the data he sent us:
Wii with WiiConnect24 enabled uses 550 Wh of electricity (including active and standby) for each hour of active use, which is significantly higher than the figures for the currently-available Xbox 360 S (125 Wh per hour of use) and PS3 Slim (107 Wh per hour of use) consoles. Even with WiiConnect24 disabled, the average Wii consumes approximately the same amount of electricity for each hour of use as currently available models of PS3 and Xbox 360.
Face, Nintendo!
Using recent Nielson data about console usage and recognizing the existence of the WiiConnect24 service, this paper concluded that the Nintendo’s Wii could even be considered substantially worse than the Xbox 360 or PS3 in power usage, depending on conditions. More importantly, Hittinger found that any game console, when powered down after use, compares favorably to other household electronics.
You’ll find more surprising findings after the jump. If you’d like to read Hittinger’s full paper,head here.
