Xbox Living

The Xbox 360 is a power-hungry machine. That’s easy to determine with one look at the massive brick of a power supply that comes packaged with the system. The machine eats up 160 watts of power, more than double the power usage of the original Xbox. Clearly, the system isn’t environmentally friendly. You could do worse, though; playing games on a PS3 or a PC will use even more power.

Take a look at how the various video game platforms compare with each other in terms of power usage:

Source: hardCOREware.net

As you can plainly see, the Nintendo Wii is the clear winner here, and that’s no surprise. Nintendo designed the machine to be small, quiet, cheap and efficient. The Wii is also far less powerful than any of its competitors in terms of graphics processing. If the environment were the only factor, I’d say let’s all just play the Wii instead.

But there are some great games on the Xbox 360, as well as the best online play across any platform. So sorry, Earth, but we’d like to keep playing. So how can you minimize your Xbox 360’s power usage and feel a little less guilty about the countless hours you spend online?

Well, for starters you can unplug your Xbox 360 when it’s turned off. Like all consoles, the Xbox 360 isn’t really off when it’s off. Instead, it goes into a ’standby’ mode that maintains a network connection and keeps looking for a nearby controller to activate it. This standby mode continually eats 2.5 watts of power. That’s may not sound like much, but it certainly adds up over time. (Interestingly, the Wii is at the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to standby mode — if you use the WiiConnect24 feature to keep your console up-to-date, the system will use 9.5 watts of power in standby.) So when you’re not playing, switch off your powerbar or unplug the console to save some of this energy.

Next, you can not watch DVDs on your Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 eats up much more power than a standard DVD player, so watching movies on your 360 is an unnecessary energy drain. There’s a more selfish reason to do this as well — all video game consoles have a tendency to wear out and playing DVDs only adds more spin time to your disc drive. Better to put that entertainment mileage on a cheaper player.

Use rechargable batteries for your controllers. Okay, this one won’t necessarily save energy but it’s an environmentally friendly step for your 360. Microsoft sells a rechargeable pack for the wireless controllers, but you can get rechargeable AA batteries for less. Slap these in and prevent dozens (or hundreds) of alkaline batteries from piling up at the dump.

None of these tips are particularly difficult to follow and they’ll help cut back your Xbox 360 power usage significantly. In turn, that will help the environment — and save you some coin on your energy bill. Sounds like a plan to me.