basic PS question- electricity bill

A

Aquineas

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 2, 2004
Messages
214
Hey folks, I am not an EE and admittedly don't know much about watts, current, amps, and all that Jazz. All I know is I live in Texas and with $400 a month electric bills in the summer not uncommon, I don't leave my PC on when I'm not using it, and have a concern about how much power my PC is eating.

Currently have an OCZ Gamexstream 700 power supply in my rig. I suspect that it's on the verge of being overtaxed in my system (see sig for system description, and I will be adding a 4870x2 this fall).

If I move to a larger power supply, say the Corsair HX1000, which will be overkill for my system, does the power supply always drawing the rated amount in Watts? Or does it only draw what is needed by the system?

Thanks
 
^^
He is right. If your computer needs 100W and you have a 1000W PSU, it will only pull what it needs, not use 1000W.

Also, I seriously doubt that is overtaxing your system. In the below review [H] finds a GTX280 OC system to draw 380W at peak load. Thats the WHOLE SYSTEM, not just the GPU. Unless you have 10 more HDDs that you haven't told us about, 700 is plenty. You could get a Kill-A-Watt to check out power usage (innaccurate) or a UPS. My UPS tells me that my E8400/8800GT system pulls 60W idle, 150W load.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTUxOCwxMCwsaGVudGh1c2lhc3Q=
 
From a previous post of mine, a look at your power bill for the current rate and adjust the hours to your use if you like, the math is pretty easy to follow.


Lets assume the computer pulls 400W from the wall, a reasonable figure for a machine with a 700W supply. Lets add 100W for LCD monitor and misc crap and mainly to make the math easy call it 500W pulled from the wall to run the machine and its accessories.

Lets assume (gaming was the OPs intent) computer runs 4 hours weekday nights and 10 hours on Sat and 8 hours on Sunday and lets assume every month has 4 standard weeks. This is not correct but in general is a reasonalbe estimate of machine use. That is 38hours a week x 4 = 152 hours a month.

Watthours is 500w x152h = 76,000wh = 76Kwh

Above someone said power in texas was .22 per Kwh, lets use .25

76 x .25 = $19 of power cost for a month.

What if you forget and leave a closet light on for a month ? (assume a 30day month).
75W x 24hr x 30 days = 54Kwh x .25 = $13.50

My point is, a couple of those compact flourescent bulbs, tuning off lights you dont need (like your mom and dad used to yell at you about), make sun tea instead of firing up the stove to boil water, put you porch light on a motion sensor etc etc. it would, for most of us energy hogs, be very easy to conserve the cost of running a PC through changing usage patterns and a little care and thought. (most of us run our freezers/refigerators too cold, get an accurate thermometer and measure and adjust the thermostat, should be done/checked twice a year and keep the coils clean of dust. )
 
The reason I questioned the power supply is because I'm seeing some really weird anomalies with my system, and I'm not sure if it's my MB, the CPU, the power-supply, or even perhaps my Lian LI PC-V2000Aplus II case, which has an integrated power-switch/reset button (my only complaint about the case)
  • Whenever I power my system down, it immediately boots back up (and yes, I have "wake-on-lan" and other related bios events turned off)
  • Sometimes when booting up it doesn't quite "boot" right. Rebooting usually solves it, but it's like it doesn't have the juice
  • On the initial BIOS screen where it shows my memory (and should show the CPU speed), I am not seeing the CPU speed
  • For some reason AOD (AMD overdrive) is reporting that my CPU is underclocked, despite many attempts to force it not to do so
 
yea best thing to do is just turn the thing off when you're not using it as you are. also you may want to turn the switch off at the power bar, its not a lot but can save a couple watts. i know my logitech speakers have a standby mode so the remote can work. turning the switch off saves that small amount of power.

if you want to go nuts you can always undervolt/underclock your cpu
 
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