Elysion
Banned
If you look back at the PS1 for example, it only consumed around 10W or so, which is less than early Switch models use in handheld mode! The N64 used less than 20W, and the same is true for all consoles before that afaik. Even the Dreamcast only consumed 22W. These consoles used so little power that they didn’t even need any active cooling at all. It‘s only with the PS2 that consoles started to use a bit more power (40-50W for the PS2), before it really exploded with the PS3 and 360, whose launch models used between 150 and 200W. PS4 and XBOne were a bit lower, but PS5 and Series X are right back to 200W.
My question is, why didn’t Sony, Nintendo or Sega let their earlier consoles consume more power to get more performance out of them? It wouldn‘t have to be all the way to 200W, but surely a PS1 for example that ran at higher clocks and consumed around 50W or so would‘ve been much more capable? I understand that higher power consumption means more heat, which means there‘s need for things like a fan and/or heatsinks, which means higher costs etc, but starting with PS2 future consoles did that anyway, and they still managed to be sold at mass market prices. Is there a technical reason I’m not aware of why earlier consoles couldn’t run hotter?
I mean, hypothetically speaking, if someone had decided to release a 150W console in the late 80s or early 90s, wouldn’t it have been a generation ahead of all these other consoles, like the SNES or Genesis, that ran on like 15W back then? Could a 150W console in 1990 be comparable to the PS1 in 1994, if only through brute force?
My question is, why didn’t Sony, Nintendo or Sega let their earlier consoles consume more power to get more performance out of them? It wouldn‘t have to be all the way to 200W, but surely a PS1 for example that ran at higher clocks and consumed around 50W or so would‘ve been much more capable? I understand that higher power consumption means more heat, which means there‘s need for things like a fan and/or heatsinks, which means higher costs etc, but starting with PS2 future consoles did that anyway, and they still managed to be sold at mass market prices. Is there a technical reason I’m not aware of why earlier consoles couldn’t run hotter?
I mean, hypothetically speaking, if someone had decided to release a 150W console in the late 80s or early 90s, wouldn’t it have been a generation ahead of all these other consoles, like the SNES or Genesis, that ran on like 15W back then? Could a 150W console in 1990 be comparable to the PS1 in 1994, if only through brute force?
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