Surprising Power Consumption Of Ubuntu 11.04 vs. Windows 7

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 29 June 2011 at 08:44 AM EDT. Page 4 of 9. 22 Comments.

Next up are the power results for the Intel Core i7 990X "Gulftown" system with its six physical cores and then Hyper Threading. With the $999 USD CPU was a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX graphics card.

This Intel desktop was actually going through less power under Ubuntu 11.04 during the boot-up and desktop idling process than was the case with Windows 7 Professional. Windows 7 in this situation was using just under 10% more power.

During the light desktop usage of web browsing, file management, and operating system navigation, the power consumption was close between the two operating systems. The Ubuntu 11.04 results may have come out slightly better, but the overall power consumption was close.

While the ThinkPad T61 with NVIDIA Quadro graphics did quite badly in terms of power consumption during YouTube video playback with Adobe Flash, this was not the case for the Core i7 990X system and the GeForce 9800GTX graphics card. During the OilRush playback process again at 720p full-screen, the power consumption was close between the Microsoft and Canonical operating systems.


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