What is net effect on PC power from Vista and Core 2 Duo?

Hi, any thoughts on the net increase in power consumption by PCs from the introduction of Vista and Core 2 Duo?

I figure it would probably raise average power consumption by 10-15% or around 25-50W? This is just a rough guess but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on this?

Vista will force an increase in power mainly because users will need a DirectX 9 capable GPU. Graphic cards are power hogs and will probably add another roughly 50-100W per PC, especially to run Aero?

Core 2 Duo will likely reduce power consumption by around 25-50W as their TDPs are around 75W versus 100-130W for Pentium Ds and Prescotts.

Is this thinking right? :?: Thanks!

Core 2 Duo CPUs are actually pretty power efficient. Xbitlabs.com has done a reveiw on them. At full load the E6300 consumes 44w of power, the X6800 consumes 66w of power:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/c [...] ut_11.html

Video cards are actually more power hungry than CPUs. Below is another link to an Xbitlab.com GPU review, it's a bit dated from July 2006 so it won't have the X1950 or 7950GT cards:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/v [...] noise.html

By far, ATI video cards are more power hungry than nVidia. On the premium end the X1900XT is a slightly more powerful card than the 7900GT, but it consumes more than twice the power; 108w vs. 48w.

On the entry level side of things the X1300 uses about 31w, not bad. But the 7300GS uses only 16w of power. Of course that doesn't take into account performance. I actually don't know which entry level card performs better, nor do I care since entry level cards are not on my shopping list.