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Power consumption and Vistas Aero interface
Thursday, October 5th, 2006
Much has been made of Windows Vista’s new Aero interface, and for good reason. The GUI is 
loaded with luscious eye candy, including the liberal use of transparency, and even a few 3D effects. That eye candy doesn’t come cheap, though. Aero relies on graphics hardware to accelerate the interface, and requires a DirectX 9-compatible graphics card that supports Shader Model 2.0 and has at least 128MB of memory. Those requirements are pretty steep for an operating system, but they also raise an interesting question: if Aero is accelerated with graphics hardware, will system power consumption rise as a result?
Obviously, higher power consumption isn’t a good thing. For one, it makes a system more expensive to run. More importantly, though, it increases the amount of heat that must be dissipated by a chassis’ cooling configuration. The more heat you have to dissipate, the more cooling you need, and that can lead to higher system noise levels.
To determine whether running Vista’s Aero interface increases a system’s power consumption, I grabbed a copy of the latest public release candidate, x64 build 5728, and a stack of graphics cards that included a Radeon X1900 XTX and X1800 GTO, and a GeForce 7900 GTX, 7900 GT, and 7600 GT. Then, I put together a system with an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ processor, MSI K9N SLI Platinum motherboard, 2GB of Corsair DDR2 memory, Western Digital Caviar RE2 hard drive, and a 700W OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply and began testing. The Tech Report - Power consumption and Vista’s Aero interface
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