A tech website has conducted some very thorough testing on the new Falcon Xbox 360's. They have found that playing Halo 3 on the Falcon actually consumes less power than the original Xbox 360 sitting idle at the dashboard. However, the console is still noisy due to a loud DVD drive but overall the Falcon results in power savings and ultimately cost benefits for MS.

Playing Halo 3 on the new Falcon consumes less power than the old Xbox 360 just sitting idle at the dashboard.

With the system shut off, the new Falcon does use a little more power than the old Xbox but the difference is hardly significant.

Despite the power reduction, the console is still noisy thanks to a loud DVD drive. The major benefit to the smaller chips is power savings for you, and cost savings for Microsoft. Gotta help the boys in Redmond keep profits up.

The power savings won't translate into better gameplay, so there's no reason to upgrade. The energy savings would amount to dollars per month, definitely not making up for the cost of buying a whole new console, but our inner geek just had to open one of these Falcons and see what made them tick - and how big of a power reduction we could expect.