The whole world’s wallet has been squeezed quite a bit this year due to the rising cost of living in land after land. Thus, any money saved is a good thing. If you own an Xbox One or Xbox Series console, then there’s a feature tucked away in the settings which should help do just this: Energy Saver Mode.
According to a report from The Verge and findings from UK tech editor at the Guardian, Alex Hern, have concluded that making use of this low-power toggle particularly in the UK can net some £5 worth of savings on a monthly basis.
The modern Xbox family has two different kinds of power states: one is called Instant On, which allows the system to “light sleep” in standby mode. While this results in being able to quickly hop in and out of a session, it also results in the Xbox sipping 11-13 watts of power (depending on the exact system). On the other hand, the Energy Saver Mode does exactly what it says on the tin and reduces that power consumption by a considerable amount—up to only 0.5 watts.
While Energy Saver Mode puts the Xbox into a deeper state of sleep, thus resulting in a longer boot-up sequence, it literally pays for itself by saving the end-user some money on their energy bill.
£5 per month equates to £60; not a huge amount of money, but definitely a considerable difference, especially overtime. Over the course of a typical console generation (about six years), that’s essentially a whopping £360. In other words, the same price as an Xbox Series S or Nintendo Switch, or at least a considerable amount of the price of the next mainline Xbox or PlayStation system.
Thus, you can essentially view using Energy Saver Mode as paying towards your next system, or at least having some extra cash around for more games/accessories. Of course, this all comes in addition to making at least a small positive change for a greener life.
According to The Verge, since this March, Microsoft has actually started shipping out new Xbox systems with the Energy Saver Mode already activated.
So, if you’ve never fiddled with your system’s boot settings since you bought it earlier this year, then chances are you could be running in this mode already.
While this report highlights savings found according to UK data, this definitely applies to folks all over the globe. Even if the savings aren’t exactly the same, it’s bound to make at least a few dollars difference on your monthly energy bill, which, again, everyone could use right now.
If energy efficiency is an even bigger concern to you, then it should come as no surprise that the Nintendo Switch is the most power-saving out of all modern consoles. Nintendo UK actually has an entire page that details the energy consumption of the system across different states, such as actively gaming, sitting on the HOME menu, and streaming media.
The highest usage recorded is just 7 watts for gaming on the standard Switch; the OLED model is slightly more efficient at 6 watts doing the same thing. This means the Switch consumes half the amount of wattage while it’s running on all cylinders, versus the Xbox systems just sitting in sleep mode. Thus, while the Switch may not be a powerhouse, it certainly is a greenhouse, so to speak.
Source: The Verge
