Due to hardware availability, this Independence Day benchmarking was just carried out on an Apple Mac Mini with a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 processor, Apple Mac-F22C86C8 motherboard with NVIDIA MCP79 chipset, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics, 1GB of system memory, and 120GB Fujitsu MHZ2120B SATA HDD.
Apple Mac OS X 10.6.8, Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1, and Ubuntu 11.04 were all tested in their 64-bit editions and benchmarked in their stock configurations. The only change to Windows and Ubuntu Linux was installing the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver.
Boot / Start-Up: For five minutes the power consumption was polled on each system as it performed a cold boot followed by idling at the desktop (automatic log-in) for the remainder of the time.
Basic Desktop Usage: The power consumption from idling at the desktop to launching the respective web-browser (for Windows 7 SP1 that's Internet Explorer 9, Ubuntu 11.04 the default is Mozilla Firefox 4.0, and Mac OS X has Safari), navigating to Phoronix.com, and then launching the operating system's file manager, navigating each system's menus, etc. Just light desktop usage under each operating system.
Gaming: The power consumption while running the open-source Nexuiz OpenGL game natively under each operating system.
To much not surprise at all, the Mac Mini with Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics had consumed the least amount of power when running Mac OS X. With Apple having full control over the hardware and software, it's not too surprising that Apple's own operating system had a definite advantage. When the system was fully booted and idling, Mac OS X 10.6.8 was going through nearly 30% less power than Ubuntu and Windows, which were comparable in terms of desktop power usage.
For light desktop usage from the Mac Mini, the Windows 7 Pro SP1 numbers were close to Mac OS X 10.6.8 and its aggressive power management. Falling behind here was Ubuntu 11.04 with it going through about 10% more power.
When running the OpenGL Nexuiz game, Ubuntu 11.04 continued burning through more power than Apple Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" did and to some extent, Windows 7 too.
Microsoft Windows 7 Pro SP1 had the highest frame-rate when running Nexuiz on each OS at 1920 x 1080, but on none of the platforms was the HD resolution playable when HDR was enabled.
At least for this Apple Mac Mini, Mac OS X is more power efficient than Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04, but it should not be too much of a surprise at all.
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