Ubuntu 11.10 vs. Fedora 16: Boot Speed, Power Consumption

Finally it is onto the power consumption results for the Core i7 + NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M notebook, a.k.a. the Lenovo ThinkPad W510.

The power consumption when running the OpenArena game averaged out to be the same between Fedora 16 and Ubuntu 11.10.

However, like all of the other results, the OpenGL performance was much faster under Fedora 16 thanks to its more liberal graphics stack.

There also was not any significant power consumption difference between these two popular Linux distributions when tapping all of the available CPU cores with C-Ray.

The C-Ray test result here was also the same on both distributions.

While Ubuntu 11.10 may commonly be booting faster than Fedora 16, when comparing the power consumption results there is no frontrunner. For the most part, the power consumption is the same between Fedora 16 and Ubuntu 11.10, but depending upon the CPU, GPU, and other factors there can be slight differences. Fortunately, for both operating systems, there are power management improvements coming down the pipe that will hit for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Fedora 17, if they do not end up being back-ported.