An interesting video comparing the Series X and the PS5s cooling systems.
Both companies put alot more effort into cooling this gen. Even tho the One X had excellent cooling and sound profiles, Microsoft upped their game again for the Series X.
Its interesting to note that the One X has a higher power consumption than the Series X, yet the Series X has a much bigger heat sink than the One X did.
Yeah both consoles are very good from a thermal point of view this gen.
In regards to the power consumption difference, that won’t last I reckon because we know the Series X has a bigger power supply and, like you said, the heat sink is much bigger and that is for a reason. My theory is that the first wave of games are just not tapping into the full power of the Series X and there is a significant amount of power that is still to come from the console.
I can’t recall exact details, but the first month saw a few different updates for Series X|S dealing with various Rest/PowerSave modes. Getting a genuine apples to apples comparison in rest mode is quite difficult because either system may or may not be doing additional housekeeping tasks such as downloading updates or applying filesystem cleanups or optimizations etc. The only way to possibly be sure is to have both systems in their official Offline modes via system settings, disconnected from the internet, and in the Rest/Sleep/PowerSave mode for at least 15 minutes.
By the same token, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Xbox Consoles do use a bit more power consumption in that mode. There was talk about the PS5 possibly having a secondary low power SOC to do some system tasks when in Rest/Sleep/PowerSave mode. That was to be similar to what they had planned for the PS4 but actually working this time. The PS4 secondary SouthBridge chip turned out not powerful enough to do those tasks, so this never materialized.