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The Power Consumption of Modern PCs

Posted by Zonk on Tue Feb 06, 2007 11:29 AM
from the keep-your-lights-off-to-compensate dept.
Power Hardware
janp writes "The power consumption of modern PCs has skyrocketed the past few years. Hardware.Info has done some fairly extensive research on the power usage of various configurations. It turns out the a high-end gaming rig can easily use more than 400 W, and that putting a system in stand-by isn't as saving as you might think. The article has some interesting tips to save on power costs."
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[+] Server Power Consumption Doubled Over Past 5 years 148 comments
Watt's up writes "A new study shows an alarming increase in server power consumption over the past five years. In the US, servers (including cooling equipment) consumes 1.2% of all the electricity in 2005, up from 0.6% in 2000. The trend is similar worldwide. 'If current trends continue, server electricity usage will jump 40 percent by 2010, driven in part by the rise of cheap blade servers, which increase overall power use faster than larger ones. Virtualization and consolidation of servers will work against this trend, though, and it's difficult to predict what will happen as data centers increasingly standardize on power-efficient chips." We also had a recent discussion of power consumption in consumer PCs that you might find interesting.
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  • Conserving energy by not using applications (Score:3, Funny)

    by Radon360 (951529) on Tuesday February 06 2007, @11:37AM (#17905938)

    I think the author of this article tried conserving energy by not using spell check.

    • He wsa jstu tyirng ot rerutn teh lteters to thrie natrual rnamdo staet ot icnresae entrp!oy

  • Get Laptops or smaller (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Salvance (1014001) * on Tuesday February 06 2007, @11:38AM (#17905952) Homepage Journal
    If you're worried about power consumption, you're not going to buy a top of the line gaming rig. You'd probably buy a relatively low powered laptop (or even buy a very underpowered laptop similar to a OLPC machine). Gaming machines will continue to be bigger and bigger power hogs. More power consumption = faster and better gameplay, no way around it.

    • If you're worried about power consumption, you're not going to buy a top of the line gaming rig. You'd probably buy a relatively low powered laptop
      Except, in a short time, Vista is going to start causing everyone to need to upgrade to big, honking machines with high power consumption just to run the new interface.

      Microsoft seems happy to be helping drive this trend towards ridiculous power consumption.

      Cheers
      • Except Vista's new interface runs fine with all the fancy 3D effects on "underpowered" integrated Intel graphics solutions. When not charging the battery, and with the screen at full brightness and CPU at full speed, my laptop with the Intel GMA950 draws about 20-25w.

      • Microsoft seems happy to be helping drive this trend towards ridiculous power consumption.

        Of course! The vast majority of Windows licenses are sold via OEMs. If people stop buying new computers (because the current ones are fast enough), how would Microsoft make any money?

    • Re:Get Laptops or smaller (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tomstdenis (446163) <tomstdenis@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday February 06 2007, @11:51AM (#17906172) Homepage
      Not really. more crap in game IMPLIES more power, but compare say a 486 to a Core 2 Duo. The latter is much more efficient per MIPS than the former.

      To put it another way, to match the power [in MIPS] of a typical 1989 486 desktop, you could do so with far less power consumption today. The problem is few companies write conservative software. Go ahead, make your application inefficient, a new cpu is always around the corner!

      What people seem to forget is that we were doing word processing, vector graphics and all that on old school Mac IIs in the mid to early 80s. Those programs certainly didn't require hundreds of megabytes of ram or gigabytes of disk space. Of course people associate numerical requirements with quality. CPU has more megahurts? It must be better! Game needs a faster GPU? It must be awesomer! etc...

      I'm personally impress with efficiency not bulkyness. Write me a competent word processor that fits on a floppy disk. That'd be a hoot.
      • I agree - most of my apps run just fine on my machine, but some apps, like video editing, are still a nightmare. I'd like to upgrade and just have that app run faster, but you need a newer OS to take advantage of newer computer features (multi-core or more memory or SATA or RAID), which then requires an upgrade to the app, which, instead of bug fixes, has been fattened by unwanted extra features.

        Try this site, though. [tinyapps.org]

      • What people seem to forget is that we were doing word processing, vector graphics and all that on old school Mac IIs in the mid to early 80s. Those programs certainly didn't require hundreds of megabytes of ram or gigabytes of disk space

        Those applications also did far less. There's still a comparably light-weight word processing application on every PC. It's called notepad.

        I'm personally impress with efficiency not bulkyness. Write me a competent word
        processor that fits on a floppy disk. That'd be a hoot

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Banzai042 (948220)
      Not always, granted if you want an 8800GTS/X you'll need a big power supply, but if you go with something like the upcoming 8600 Ultra (not the highest end, but should still have some pretty good performance in dx9 games), which has no PCI-e power connector (draws enough power from the slot), just about any C2D cpu, a single optical drive, and a single hard drive, you'll have a machine that's pretty light on power use. Just because it's possible to get a machine that needs a 750 Watt PSU doesn't mean that's
    • I'm starting to find all kinds of limitations with this box, but it's still worth mentioning. Built summer before last, it's a socket 747 or somesuch -- 1.8 ghz Athlon64 (stupidly bought because I can upgrade it to 2.7, was mostly stable at 2.4, but really only rock solid at 1.8), pair of 250 gig hard drives in RAID 0, 2 gigs of DDR 400, GeForce 6600.

      There's some vibration now that I'm trying to kill, but before that, it was as quiet as any water-cooled rig. Got a nice cool, quiet power supply, and the vide
  • my 2 machines were easily averaging 500W. I thought a $140 electricity bill in the winter was a bit high, so bought a kill-a-watt and figured out that my computers were consuming 12 of the 18 KWH my apt was using a month. Now they are turned off except when I need them, and thanks to Wake-On-Lan, I can turn them on remotely as well.
    • Now they are turned off except when I need them, and thanks to Wake-On-Lan, I can turn them on remotely as well.

      Just to clarify, your machines aren't actually turned off, are they? I was under the impression that WoL needed the machines to either be in Standby or Suspend mode, which means they're still on to some degree (though using much less power than a fully "awake" machine).

      • Re:No Kidding (Score:4, Informative)

        by alexhs (877055) on Tuesday February 06 2007, @12:28PM (#17906890) Homepage Journal
        They're as 'off' as an ATX can be 'off' with the power supply switch to 'I'. You need a cold boot, but of course you still use some power. It's G2 state [wikipedia.org]

      • Re:No Kidding (Score:5, Informative)

        by ashitaka (27544) on Tuesday February 06 2007, @12:33PM (#17907006) Homepage
        No, they can actually be fully "shut down".

        On a modern PC with a built-in motherboard you will notice at least one lit LED on the motherboard as long as the PC is plugged in. A tiny amount of power is being provided to the network adapter to listen for "magic packets" which, after being verified, will cause the machine to power up as if you pressed the power switch. This could be from standby or suspend but a cold boot is also possible.
    • Your 2 pcs at 500w are averaging between 4 and 6c an hour. At full load without power saving, and turned on 24:7 the worst case scenario is $30-$40 a month. In a real world situation this would probably average around $15 dollars a month.
      An actually meter on my computer (150 watt power supply, with power saving features) showed that I was averaging around $8 a month.

      On the other hand, your "energy saving" refridgerator will cost many times this amount. Mine averages around $70 a month worth of electricity.

      Y

      • Re:No your math is wrong (follow up) (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Darkfred (245270) on Tuesday February 06 2007, @12:26PM (#17906830) Homepage Journal
        Obviously I bought a new refridgerator. A 10 year old refridgerator is just not efficient anymore.

        But the scariest thing I found during my power audit was that each incandescent lightbulb was taking more power than my computer at rest. A single chandelier in my house accounted for 1/4 of my electrical bill.
        By replacing all the lightbulbs with compact flourescent I was able to shave a 3rd off my monthly bill. (still quite high because of an old ac system).

        In conclusion your computer is such a minor contribution to electricity that you shouldn't even be considering it before you fix the big offenders.
        • That's insane - you either have few lights in your house and gas heating and hot water, or that chandelier was lighting a football field. And your math may be bit off. If your lamp accouted for 25% of your costs, and you replaced the lamps with fluorescents at the same light output (75% energy savings) your electric bill should have only dropped by (3/4 of 25, carry the 2,...) 18.8%, or 1/6 of your bill. Still, to have a single fixture account for 25% of your electric bill is amazing. At my office - about
        • Except a computer that is running 24 hours a day is not a minor contribution to your electricity consumption.
        • Using a kill-a-watt I found out that my computer draws 600W. (3 monitors, dual cpu, high end video card, 4 hard drives, 8 fans)

          I was able to reduce my power bill from $250/month to $100/month by turning it off every night.

          The upshot is that people should buy a kill-a-watt and find out what the big offenders are. Guessing probably won't work.
      • On the other hand, your "energy saving" refridgerator will cost many times this amount. Mine averages around $70 a month worth of electricity.

        My total electric bill rarely climbs above $70/mo, and yes, my apartment does have a refrigerator in it (and not a particularly "green" one, either).

        There must be some other factor at play.
        • Like I said in my follow up, the other major offender in my house (besides AC and refridgerator) was incandescent light bulbs. A single 4 bulb chandelier will take more electricity than a massive 300W power supply at full draw and 100W monitor. My biggest savings in doller/per KWh was replacing all my light bubls with 10 and 15watt compact flourescents.

          I had an 8 bulb chandelier which turned out to be the single most expensive device in my house, who would have guessed.
      • uh. This is how I computed it.

        Con Ed tells me I am averaging 18 KWH a day.

        Con Ed charged me $150 for electricity (17-18c a KWH)

        Computers are using over 500W (kill-a-watt, energy reader tells me this) steady if both are on (i.e. at least 12 KWH a day)

        hence, computers were using at least 2/3 of my daily electricity.
        • Even at those insane rates, and assuming your computers ALWAYS use their power supplies maximum rated power (technically impossible) that is still only $60 a month. Most computers only draw half their power supply rating and even less when in power saving mode. Do you really leave the monitors on all day?
          Kill-o-watt's spot metering is just not accurate for computers because their power consumption varies by 75% with simple application changes.
          But my guess is that you don't have kill-o-watt, you are just usi

      • I think he meant 18 kW-h/day, not for the entire month; that would be about 540 kW-h/month, which is only about $.27 per kW-h; probably not too far off considering taxes and the typical flat-fee "customer charge" that many companies bill even if you used 0 energy.

      • 18 KWH a day. though the math was off a little. it was about 130 for electricity (20+ for gas) and it was a long month due to the holidays. and there were various taxes and fees that raised it. Though this bill it was actually 19KWH a day.

  • modern PCs or gaming PCs? There's a difference (Score:3, Insightful)

    by grommit (97148) on Tuesday February 06 2007, @12:00PM (#17906344)
    The summary mentions modern PCs but it seems to be about gaming PCs. Posting a story saying that gaming PCs take up a lot of electricity is pretty much stating the obvious.

    I'd be more interested to see the power consumption differences between an off she shelf Best Buy computer of 5-10 years ago compared to one of today. Brick and mortar electronics stores are where a good majority of people buy their computers so as far as home computer power usage goes, that's what matters. I'd like to think that with components like sound, networking and video being put on the mainboard and the ability of major manufacturers to set machines to go into a sleep mode by default that computers of today would actually take up less power than those of yesteryear.

    Not having any machine of that type around, I can't really do any testing unfortunately.

    • I'd be more interested to see the power consumption differences between an off she shelf Best Buy computer of 5-10 years ago compared to one of today.
      It's no secret that power consumption of PCs has gone up steadily. I'll bet you hard money that a Best Buy special made today is going to consume more power than a Best Buy special of 5 years ago. You might save a couple watts by having on-board LAN, but it's going to be more than taken up by higher electrical usage of the processor. As a real world compari

    • I'd be more interested to see the power consumption differences between an off she shelf Best Buy computer of 5-10 years ago compared to one of today.

      Ten years ago, I had a Packard Bell 486 desktop (yes, purchased at Best Buy). I don't know how much power it used, exactly, but what I can tell you is that the CPU was passively cooled by a heatsink machined with cubes -- not fins -- about 2mm on a side. On my newer computers, even the RAM has bigger heatsinks (and therefore dissipates more energy) than that

    • The summary mentions modern PCs but it seems to be about gaming PCs.

      That's for sure, the power consumption I see on a general-purpose Core 2 Duo desktop system built last fall (excluding display) maxes out at about 93 Watts, much lower than their examples.
      That's including 4 Watts for when the USB Eye-TV Hybrid NTSC/ATSC tuner is active, and with both cores of the E6300 kept maxed out (BOINC client always running) and the 1.86 GHz CPU overclocked to about 2.25 GHz by pushing the FSB speed a bit.
      The CPU runs

  • I just did some research on this actually (Score:5, Informative)

    by casualsax3 (875131) on Tuesday February 06 2007, @12:03PM (#17906388)
    A few weeks ago I tested some power supplies to see if it's worth spending $70 on a power supply vs the crappy stock PSU that comes with a lot of cases you can find on NewEgg.

    I used Kill-a-Watt power tester, which can test for a number of things - I used raw amps.

    I tested 4 machines with 5 power supplies in 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 drive configurations. I also took a reading of how much power the systems drew when I powered them on at 4 drives, which shows how efficient the power supplies become under serious load (it takes a good chunk of power to spin up 4 drives)

    The machines were all tested with the same 1x1GB PC5300 RAM, and the same four Western Digital SATA drives. The Intel systems were LGA775 chips on an Asus, and the AMD's were AM2 - also using an Asus motherboard.

    Here are the results (hosted by Voxel.net, so it should hold :) http://newyorkhatesyou.com/Power_Supplies.pdf [newyorkhatesyou.com]

    Power supplies tested: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82 E16817256001 [newegg.com]

    http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82 E16817371006 [newegg.com]

    http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82 E16817151022 [newegg.com]

    http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82 E16817234002 [newegg.com]

    In a lot of cases the stock power supply uses almost twice as much power.

    In Brooklyn I pay $.19c/kwh, so 1 amp of power can cost around $20 a month - ((volts * amps) / 1000 ) * time (in hours). This means pretty plainly, that the stock PSU here would cost me another $15 per month on my one desktop that I always have on.

    Now if an office switches all of our workstations to one of the three 80% efficient power supplies, we stand to save a few hundred per month. Add to that the fact that these power supplies generally have more stable rails, and they should last longer - and its really a no brainer.

    • Nice data. I'm surprised to see the Antec PSU more efficient than the Seasonic as Seasonic is generally regarded as one of if not the most efficient PSU manufactures. In fact, Seasonic manufactures many PSUs for other companies, Antec included so I would not be surprised if the Antec PSU you tested was in fact a rebadged Seasonic unit.

      There is a full review of the PSU [silentpcreview.com] at SilentPCReview [silentpcreview.com] who has many full reviews of PSUs including efficiency tests.

      In general, any PSU with active PFC will generally pretty effi

      • Re:I just did some research on this actually (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Spoke (6112) <drees@greenhydrant.com> on Tuesday February 06 2007, @02:11PM (#17908736)
        One other guideline when purchasing a PSU:

        Buy the smallest PSU possible!

        Many people out there have "SUV syndrome" when buying a PSU and incorrectly assume that they need that huge 500w (or bigger) PSU for their PC. Unless you really do have a high-end gaming PC with a high-end graphics card and multiple hard drives, your computer will almost certainly normally use less than 200w peak, and more typically 75-150w.

        What does happen with an oversized PSU is in order to build a PSU to handle high current, it's efficiency at low current drops significantly. Typically the efficiency of a PSU starts dropping pretty quickly below 50% capacity and even faster below 25% capacity.

        Finally, you can also look for PSUs which are 80 PLUS [80plus.org] certified. These PSUs have been independently tested to be at least 80% efficient at 20%, 50% and 100% loads with a power factor rating of at least 0.9 at those load points.

        The Antec EA430 is part of Antec's EarthWatts series of PSUs which are all 80 PLUS certified.

        Out of the other PSUs casualsax3 tested, the SilverStone SST-ST50EF is also 80 PLUS certified. I could not verify if the Seasonic S12-380 is 80 PLUS certified, but it does not appear to be so even though it is more efficient than the Silverstone in casualsax3's test. If the S12-380 is of the "S12 Energy Plus" series then it should also be 80% efficient. I wonder if Seasonic quietly started shipping Energy Plus S12s instead of the old ones...
    • You pay $0.19/kwh? Holy crap that's a lot. My peak rate last summer $0.074/kwh here in Austin, TX (on Austin Energy).
      -l
    • And don't forget, that extra power has to go somewhere; it gets turned into heat, inside your PC case.
      • Sorry, forgot to mention that all of the spin up measurements are the average of three startups, though I can tell you that the numbers never varied greatly between runs.
  • I used to live in a crappy little studio apartment. It was about 550 square feet. The winter I was there, our balmy Seattle weather dropped into the teens for a lengthy period of time, yet I never turned on my heater. The heat being put out by my refrigerator and my Pentium 4 was enough to keep me nice and toasty warm. If you're really concerned about power consumption because of money saving reasons, you could always move somewhere that electricity is cheap. Here I pay about 4 cents per KwH. Nice, huh?
    • Here I pay about 4 cents per KwH. Nice, huh?

      So that means you can afford huge sun lamps to combat the pervasive Seasonal Affective Disorder brought on by the constant clouds, eh? I keed, I keed. Seattle's a beautiful place with a lovely climate. All that stuff about rain is just a rumor spread to keep the Californians out. Really, it's sunny all summer long in Seattle. And if summer happens to fall on a weekend, everyone goes on a picnic!

    • The winter I was there, our balmy Seattle weather dropped into the teens for a lengthy period of time, yet I never turned on my heater. The heat being put out by my refrigerator and my Pentium 4 was enough to keep me nice and toasty warm.

      Although it's great if the heat produced by appliances as a byproduct is enough to heat the space, it's important to note that you shouldn't run them for the purpose of producing heat, because a heat pump can accomplish the task using less energy. See Wikipedia:

      When used

  • My 1.83Ghz Core Duo iMac has a very low power consumption. See here [anandtech.com]. 64w under heavy load and 48w idle. If I put it in sleep I'd expect [dssw.co.uk] that it uses of the order of 5w. Which is impressive given that this is almost half of the power consumption of the most efficient system on test here.
  • Link to a printable version of the article (without 10 damn pages of ads): http://www.hardware.info/print/article_print.php?i d=amdnY2pvZGOa&pageid=1 [hardware.info]
  • I'd love to save some power!
    I have a dual opteron 246 workstation. These CPUs don't support any kind of low power mode. The room gets a few degrees warmer when I run this computer. *Now* tell me how I can save some power while being able to use the workstation. Sleep mode, my ass..
    And no, I'm not planning to shell out some $$ to swap the CPUs any time soon :P
    • some businesses have just moved to xp not that long ago and they will likely wait for sp1 before even thinking about vista. Also businesses run a lot older software that may not work in vista.
    • It doesn't require a mid-range video card.
      Only if you want to run the Aero Glass interface do you need something decent; and even then, any recent ATI or nVidia card will suffice or even the Intel GMA 950 integrated chip that has been shipping on even laptops for over a year.

    • .. if MS doesn't push out XP itself via arbitrary dead-ending of critical packages (already done for what, DirectX or Media Player right? I admit I'm too lazy to check), boneheaded hardware vendors will write drivers that only work for Vista, for no reason other than to reduce their own support issues. It's already happening to Win2k.
      • Apparently someone with mod points thinks that you can have a new dominant operating system require substantially more hardware power without any corresponding increase in electricity usage..

        Maybe they know something we don't know.
        Like maybe Vista ships with a tiny cold-fusion reactor that powers your PC.
        I dunno, I haven't seen Vista... THAT would make me say "wow".
          • FUD? There is no uncertainty here.

            Vista requires more graphics power.
            More graphics power requires more electricity.
            Therefore, Vista requires more electricity.

            What exactly are these "improved power-management services?"
            Sounds like reverse-FUD to me.
            You can't do much better than turn a computer off at night.
            If it requires more electricity when its running, it will use more electricity.
            I don't care how many sleep modes it has.
            Anyone who cares about their electricity budget is going to shut them off altogether
        • If only people would stop saying things I don't agree with, I wouldn't have to mod them down. That's my slashdot moderator opinion.

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