windows vista same power draw as XP

hey! this is better than expected! turns out windows vista doesn't consume much more power than xp! i know that the power consumption will drop when vista reach the consumer launch. but in recent TOM's Hardware article; they found that vista only increase power consumption by +0.6%!
of course that means cool running pc. and of course some comment i heard about vista going to make video card failed prematurely is not true.

so i think we can rest the "vista is a notebook killer" comments.

 

I had thought I had read earlier that Vista was actually supposed to use LESS power though? That is, that it was supposed to have more efficient power management, etc. than XP and be capable of better battery life.

 

Yea, u had. I m sure.

 

I'm serious though, I could swear that improved power management, etc. and longer battery life were supposed to be one of the focuses of Vista.

Maybe it still is but is just offset by the increased power use for things like Aero, etc.?

Or maybe it will require the santa rosa platform to get the full benefits?

 

Yea.. that's y i said u did.. Vista to me, is just a pretty up version of XP, it offer no more than that for now... hopefully the ServicePack 1 will fix tat up, if there is any...

 

zadillo is right; vista will offer support for the latest advance in technology such as intel's "robson" and hybird HDD, vista will use it to cache data.

vista is not just a pretty up XP, vista changes a lot of stuff under the hood. for example; even the sound stack is change; because the old one has access to the kernel, so if there is a bad driver; the system stability would be compromised. this is just one of many changes that vista has. it really is different than xp.

 

Using Vista without Aero, my battery life was around the same as it was with WinXP Home. However, adding Aero dropped it by around 20 minutes.

 

That's probably what I'm thinking of it; that Vista will need stuff like Robson and hybrid HDD's to realize some of those benefits.

 

Not quite yet. It still depends on the hardware it runs on. I haven't read the article on Tom's (got a link please?), but there are a lot of factors involved, and most of these depends on the hardware.
As mentioned above, the presence of a hybrid HDD may boost Vista's battery life. But another important factor I'd expect is the graphics card. It has to render 3d all the time. Obviously, some cards can do this without affecting power consumption much, but others may show a greater power consumption penalty in Vista.

Which also means it can no longer do audio hardware acceleration.
There's a reason it used to be in the kernel. I don't know which is a better solution, but I thought I'd point out that Vista's "solution" has its downsides too...

 

i'm not sure about this. but maybe you'll see some improvement as better driver support for vista is created.

oops sorry. how rude of me. i forgot to put in the link. here ya go.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page11.html

i thought creative has created a new driver for X-fi to support the EAX.

 

Thanks for the link. (I see they only tested with a X1900 GPU. I wonder what the results would have been with a 7900, or a low-end chip like a GMA 950?)

Here's another one I found:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917
Not about power consumption in particular, but a very detailed (as usual from anandtech) look at performance in Vista, and the pro's and cons of upgrading.

As far as I know, hardware acceleration is impossible on Vista. At least, that was what I gathered from some MS developer interviews a while back (browse around channel9.msdn.com to find them).
Of course I guess they could still implement EAX support in software. I'm not 100% sure on this, and I guess they might have tweaked things a bit.

However, if something happens outside the kernel, it has no direct access to the hardware. And no direct access to the hardware means no hardware acceleration. So obviously *something* will still have to be executed in the kernel. (which I guess is the case no matter what. There has to be some kind of driver in the kernel to talk to the sound card hardware, even if the audio stack is moved to user space)

So maybe I'm wrong, and it is possible after all, but then the benefit of their user-mode stack is questionable...