Power Requirements for Xbox 360?

[Caltek9]

Hi All,

I have a n00b question about power for the 360.

If one wanted to make a truly portable Xbox360 (with no disc drive, no hard drive, and no wi-fi, and a small-ish screen), how many batteries would it need to run without the power brick? Could it be run without a power brick? What kind of batteries would you need in order to do this?

Let's say you were going to use only rechargeable batteries that go in the 360 controllers? Any guesses on how many you'd need?

Thanks for humoring me. Watching what you all do here is pretty much beyond me, and I love it!

-Caltek9

[lifeisbetterwithketchup]

Hi All,

I have a n00b question about power for the 360.

If one wanted to make a truly portable Xbox360 (with no disc drive, no hard drive, and no wi-fi, and a small-ish screen), how many batteries would it need to run without the power brick? Could it be run without a power brick? What kind of batteries would you need in order to do this?

Let's say you were going to use only rechargeable batteries that go in the 360 controllers? Any guesses on how many you'd need?

Thanks for humoring me. Watching what you all do here is pretty much beyond me, and I love it!

-Caltek9

You would need some fairly ridiculous batteries to keep up with an Xbox 360. For simplicity's sake, we'll ignore the power needed for the screen. A current Xbox 360 S system according to Wikipedia has a power supply rated at 135 watts. Now, these sorts of things are typically rated higher than they will need, so we'll for no good reason at all, call its requirements 75% of that: ~100W. I know the system runs primarily on a 12v rail, so for the sake of simplicity we'll pretend that's the only thing we need to power. At 12v, 100W of power would be 8.3 amps of current required to drive the system (P=iV; watts = amps * volts).

One of those battery packs for an Xbox 360 controller is I assume roughly equivalent to two AA batteries, which would land it at 3v and ~2Ah. Purely from a hypothetical standpoint, you would need four in series to get you the necessary voltage (12v). This would net you an estimated run-time of 14 minutes. You would need many sets of four of these batteries to get any respectable runtime at all. However, realistically speaking, you likely wouldn't be able to use those batteries, as I highly doubt they would support such a high discharge rate unless you ran a ludicrous amount of them in parallel, but I wouldn't recommend such a thing. In other words, using those batteries would be a lousy idea.

What you would really need would be some big fancy expensive lithium-polymer batteries. Something like this would be appropriate, and with associated circuitry to get the necessary voltages to power your system, you could possibly weasel an hour or so of play time out of the monster if you're lucky.

There's a reason nobody has done this before. It's hardly impossible, but it's very impractical and expensive. Not to mention heavy. That battery I linked would add almost two pounds to the weight of any portable.

I hope this was helpful. Many of the numbers I used were invented or assumed, but the basic idea stands.

[Caltek9]

That's actually really helpful, thanks!

That must be why the WVIs are so popular.

Follow-up n00b question: I assume it's just really difficult to rig a laptop battery to work with the 360 which is why no one has done it before?

[lifeisbetterwithketchup]

I'd imagine doing that would be about the same as using the batteries I mentioned (barring some poking around to figure out what exactly goes where on the battery pack), but laptop batteries wouldn't really be any cheaper from a price/capacity stance. You'd also void the warranty on the laptop battery (not that anyone really worries about such things on this site, but it's still worth mentioning ).