Playing your Dreamcast (stop laughing at the back)? Tinkering with your 360? Waiting for your PS3? Well, if you hate the planet so much, why don’t you move to Mars?!

Whether you think it’s the magic pixie-fairy-children, evil humanity with its evil industrialisation, dumb-shit celebrities in their converted Chieftan Tanks, or cow farts heating up the Earth’s atmosphere – or whether you’d prefer not to think about it at all – you probably would like to know how much you’re spending on electricity a year in cold, hard cash when playing games.

Online site sus-it.net has produced a league table of power consumption for games consoles – the PS3 (US version) comes out worst while Nintendo’s Wii apparently costs you (and the planet, man) the least.

The table is based on the following costs with two-hours per day game-play.

PowerGen - Price Protection 2010
Region: Midlands
Payment method: Monthly Direct Debit
Based on: Units Rate 1: 17.190p (first 900 units)
Units Rate 2: 10.610p
Prices from: 06-Nov-06

The site rates each console, “by their efficiency, based on the manufacturers published energy consumption figures.”

It also uses the criterion of ‘embedded energy’ – “the energy consumed by all of the processes associated with the production of goods, from the acquisition of the natural resources to product delivery.”

The company also bases its ratings on, “the energy (a product) will consume over its life. This is normally more than consumed in its manufacture.”

So, here in order of planet-hating-ness (well, cost in cash actually) is the table going from most efficient to least. We’re surprised that the next-gen consoles all come out worse. The table is split into a usage figure, a cost per day figure and a cost per year figure - and, as far as we've been able to find out, relates to keeping your console on 24-hours a day.


1 Sony PlayStation (PSone)
Video Games Console 10W < £0.01 £1.25
* Standby 0.2W

2 Nintendo Wii
Video Games Console 17W < £0.01 £2.13
* Standby 11W

3 Nintendo GameCube
Video Games Console 21W £0.01 £2.64
* Standby 0.4W

4 Sega Dreamcast
Video Games Console 22W £0.01 £2.76
* Standby 0.4W

5 Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2)
Video Games Console 50W £0.02 £6.27
* Standby 2W

6 Microsoft XBox
Video Games Console 70W £0.02 £8.78
* Standby 0.4W

7 Microsoft XBox 360
Video Games Console 165W £0.06 £20.71
* Standby 2W

8 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3)
Video Games Console (US Version) 380W £0.13 £47.69
US version
European (standby) Power Consumption Not Yet Available

Of course, we’re only reporting these figures and have not as yet tested them – one of the main reasons for that is that we’ve been spending too much time playing Motorstorm on our PlayStation 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. previews on our Alienware PC, when we’re not flying to Japan to see the world’s Number One Jett rock’n’roll band, Guitar Wolf, in Nagoya for the weekend.

^{Source: sus-it.net}