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Wifi vs 100mbps ethernet power consumption

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Hi guys,

Which one likely to consume more power on laptop for video streaming?

I'd like to see some figures for comparison purpose.

Thanks
 

I would imagine the wireless consumes more power. You have to overcome the loss of the transfer medium in either case.

With copper wires, the loss is pretty low.... air is a much worse electrical transfer medium. A NIC is a fairly simple device, since all it has to do is sense voltages on a differential wire pair, and generate voltages on a differential wire pair. The radio that is inside a wireless adapter is much more complex... it also will burn power constantly, since it needs to amplify both transmit RF energy, and the signals that it receives. That's my gut feeling, but I'd be interested to see a comparison as well (isolating the OS and all the stuff it does behind the scenes, could be a bit of a trick... isolation of variables, so to speak).
 
The wired link will draw less power but the power consumed by video processing and screen backlighting will so dominate that you won't be able to tell the minor difference between the two.

About 50 mW average for wired, 100 mW average for wireless.
 
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