John’s Website

Tonight I broke down and finally bought a Watts Up Pro to try to figure out the best places to save power and then measure my progress. It’s also handy or figuring out how much Vampire Power your TV, gaming consoles, etc still suck up when they’re powered off.

The first thing I checked was one of the new Xbox 360 Arcade systems with the Jasper motherboard. The power supply on this new model is rated at 150w, saving 25w over the previous Falcon motherboard and 53w over the Zephyr motherboard and the original. Check out the measurements below, both systems were tested using a 20gb HDD, HDMI and wired ethernet.

Powered off, but plugged in: 2.1w (Jasper) vs 2.8w (Falcon)

Boot to New Xbox Experience: 92.2w (Jasper) vs 98.7w (Falcon)

Updated the above Jasper number with a display connected, without once it only draws 81.3w

Kudos to Microsoft for cutting down so much on power usage with the Xbox 360! I’d like to say that this was one of their goals but it’s more likely that it was just a consequence of switching to a 65nm fabrication process on the GPU and the fact that it’s cheaper to build a 150w power supply than a 175w. I’ll try and add some numbers for watching movies and playing games on it soon.