Surprising Power Consumption Of Ubuntu 11.04 vs. Windows 7

Lastly is the AMD Phenom II X3 710 desktop with the ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card.

Ubuntu 11.04 had consumed less power on boot, but when each operating system was fully initialized, they were going through the same amount of energy.

During light desktop usage the power consumption was roughly the same.

Video playback with Flash was to the advantage of Windows. Again, likely due to the Catalyst Linux driver and it not supporting any interface that is currently implemented by Adobe Flash for offloading the playback process to the GPU.