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The Power Consumption of Modern PCs
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Feb 06, 2007 12:29 PM
from the keep-your-lights-off-to-compensate dept.
from the keep-your-lights-off-to-compensate dept.
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)
I think the author of this article tried conserving energy by not using spell check.
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Get Laptops or smaller (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Get Laptops or smaller (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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No Kidding (Score:2)
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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
Re:No Kidding (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No Kidding (Score:5, Informative)
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.
No your math is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
An actually meter
Re:No your math is wrong (follow up) (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 b
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My total electric bill rarely climbs above $70/mo, and yes, my apartment does have a refrigerator in it (and not a
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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
modern PCs or gaming PCs? There's a difference (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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 Bu
I just did some research on this actually (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I just did some research on this actually (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
So just don't turn on the heater... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So just don't turn on the heater... (Score:4, Funny)
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!
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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 lapt