High-Speed, Low-Drag: The Wii U Versus Overheating

Eurogamer's Digital Foundry finds the Wii U an efficient power consumer.

Weeks of comparison against three other consoles, the Wii, the Xbox 360 S, and the PS3 Super Slim have yielded some conclusions, according to Eurogamer's Digital Foundry.

Even when faced with Sony and Microsoft's latest redesigns, the Wii U uses less power and in a more consistent manner. Comparison testing was done using similar software applications and games, including 'Mass Effect 3,' the 'FIFA 13' Demo, and Netflix HD, "We find that the Wii U is drawing around 32 watts of power during gameplay and despite running our entire library of software, we only ever saw an occasional spike just north of 33w. The new PS3 uses 118 per cent more juice under load, while our 2010 Xbox 360S was even less efficient, requiring 139 per cent more power for gameplay."

With the Wii U's from factor and architecture being more from scratch in design, rather than a slimming redesign, issues like the 360's RROD are considerably less of a concern despite the Wii U's smaller form factor.

The article was careful to point out that the capabilities of the systems were comparable, except in the case of the Wii U's CPU, "(T)he main takeaway here is that a CPU running at just 1.24GHz and using far fewer transistors than the competition (the physical size of the chip is much smaller than both Xenon and Cell) is obviously going to consume far less power than its rivals. Gains in the efficiency of the design and the inclusion of features such as out-of-order execution will - to a certain degree - make up for the lack of dual hardware threads and the lower clock speed, but there is a dip in raw computational power that cross-platform devs are going to need to work around."

Source: Eurogamer

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