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Cost of Leaving Console On: Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and Sony PS3

Cost of Leaving Console On: Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and Sony PS3

By: Alan Ng | November 20, 2008 | 2 Comments

A new article has been released today from the Natural Resource Defence Council which talks about the costs of leaving your console online when you are not actively using it. They have included an image of a chart which suggests that the costs can be pretty high, which gamers are unaware of.

The report claims that a whopping fifty percent of all gamers leave their console on standby or just running in the background. For the PS3 alone, those of you who use the folding at home application are running up an extra $145 worth of energy costs every year! That is quite remarkable actually when you put that figure into perspective.

As a solution to these problems, the NRDC recommends that gamers just turn off your console when it is not in use, sounds like common sense to some, but it happens occasionally when people just forget to switch off completely, especially given the fact that the parents pay the energy bill.

Check out the full article for more information.

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  • Mornelithe

    Are we really squabbling about $145 bucks in a year? Really? Seriously? I mean…come on, the cost of this report was probably more than all the PS3′s energy consumption for a year. LoL.

    This is now my standard response to this:

    1) Make Me.
    2) Stop pretending that by turning off my PS3, I’m somehow preventing unclean energy from being made. When I turn it on, a generator somewhere in the world, doesn’t automatically kick on, and start producing dirty energy. IE. The dirty energy is already there, whether my PS3 uses it or not, is irrelevant. The damage to the world has already been done.
    3) Work towards alternative energy dependancy, rather than producing most of America’s energy via polluting methods, and this won’t be an issue. To tell gamers that they’re the cause, is misleading, and transfers the focus of blame from the originator, to the consumer. The consumer is not at fault, for the way that the world creates energy. The world is to blame, not just gamers.
    4) Folding at Home and other community processing projects, provides Universities with much needed computational power that their budgets could not afford. This research is quite important in the discovery of newer methods of treating incurable/degenerative diseases. Therefore, it’s a necessary thing, to leave your PS3 on.

    Once mainstream society moves away from energy production that creates a carbon footprint. This will no longer be an issue, other than, console owners can save money by turning off their machines. But to say $145 yearly, is going to change anyone’s mind…well…maybe if I only had a paper route, but since I make over 40K a year….well, I spend more on Starbucks coffee in a month, than that.

    Mornelithe

  • ni

    WHat do these testers base this on? What is the hourly usage per day?
    There are cost for leaving your console on and cost for turning it off. When they say leaving your console on do they mean for 24/7 and those are the annual costs? When they say leaving your console off do they mean on standby or completely switched off? Having it completely switched off won’t use any power what so ever. What about in standby? What is the console actually doing to consume power? The GPU and CPU aren’t in use, no fans are spinning or either are the disc drive or HDD drives. Those charts are bull.

    The consoles have been tested before on how much power they consume on idle and peak performance. With the PS3 while gaming the power consumption averaged around 180w. If you consider that we upgrade our PC’s and we buy new 800w PSU’s goes to show how much more power PC’s consume and we generally have the PC left on longer.

    I can understand the Wii being so cheap and not costing a penny. No one plays the Wii for it to actually consume any power.