The Xbox One S was the first major revision of the Xbox One console and came with a lot of changes. Apart from the fact that it was considerably smaller, It was also a lot more energy efficient. In fact, based on the tests you are about to see, it is one of the most energy efficient game consoles on the market.
How Energy Efficient Is The Xbox One S
The answer is very. It doesn’t come close to the power efficiency of the Nintendo Switch, but for a system of this spec, it blows the PlayStation 4 out of the water. The overall result, as always depends on what you are doing with the system. Like all measurements, the amount of work being processed by the hardware will influence how much power the system is consuming. The max amount of power consumed at any one time is not a constant and does fluctuate up and down depending on how hard a game is pushing the system.
For those who do not wish to read this full guide. Here is the short and sweet on the Xbox One S power consumption.
Main Menu: 20-30 watts
In Game: 40-55 watts.
Test 1: Main Menu
Once the main menu was fully booted up the power consumption settled down and seemed to stick around the 20-30 watt range. I was moving through the menu, checking options etc. The power remained quite low for the duration of this test.
Test 2: In Game
This is the important one. It’s not like people will spend much time in the main menu anyway. The fluctuation of power consumption while in game was quite large. This is excpected of course. The variations were still fairly low when compared to other game consoles. I was playing Sunset Overdrive and Minecraft. I didn’t catch the wattage go beyond 55. I’m sure it could probably hit 60 or so if there was a lot of processing going on.
