Have you seen a difforence in your electric bill?

[Warrior]

We all know AMD is going for the performance over power consumption and is really doing a great thing by cutting cpu wattage down. And Nvidias 7 Series seems to be a great power friendly series. But has all this power friendly hardware actually paying off? Is anyone seeing an inprovment in their power and electric bills? In other words, is AMD saving you money?

 

[visaris]

I noticed a good difference in my electric bill after replacing all my incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent bulbs... I suppose PowerNow could play a part in that, but I don't know how much of a difference it will make on it's own.

 

[Arcygenical]

I don't run my computer long enough to notice anything.

We replaced our AC, lightbulbs and I (Fibreglass FTL) re-insulated our basement... cuz our 2 month electric bill climed 300$ in 1 year to a STAGGARING total of 878$. (fucking Canadian power prices, jesus christ).

We'll see come september if it paid off.

 

[unclewebb]

I purchased a Kill-a-Watt meter so I could monitor power consumption under a variety of different conditions. Here's what I found.

My system consists of the following:
Full size Gigabyte ATX motherboard
Antec TruePower 480 Watt power supply
AMD64 single core overclocked to 2700 MHz
ATI AIW X800XT ( 500 MHz / 500 MHz )
2 x SATA 160 GB hard drives RAID 0
1 x DVD-RW
1 x 1 GB OCZ PC3200 memory
and a couple of case fans.

Idle - 115 Watts
Prime95 - 175 Watts
Gaming ( NFS-Most Wanted ) - 230 Watts

I tried using Cool and Quiet and also used ClockGen to drop down to approximately 1050 MHz. I was shocked to see my computer still drawing 112 Watts at idle which meant I was only saving 3 Watts.

There are a lot of great power saving technologies out there but many of them won't make any noticable difference in your power bill. I save power by using my laptop which reduces power consumption down to 25 to 30 Watts. It's OK for e-mail / internet use and it's OK for gaming as long as your definition of gaming is solitaire.

 

[Tutelary]

these technologies are meant to run the processors cooler, not save you money.

 

[Heliocentrical]

these technologies are meant to run the processors cooler, not save you money.

Yep.

They are also meant to reduce noise since the cpu fan slows down also on compatible boards. CnQ runs my Athlon 64 at 1200mhz when idle and slows the fan to 1000rpm.

 

[HighTest]

these technologies are meant to run the processors cooler, not save you money.

Word. The reason you notice little benefit is that power supply development is not keeping pace with both AMD and Intel's Cool-n-Quite or Powerstep technologies. Since the PSU are highly inefficient, you'll notice little change.

I envision a future where there will be somekind of communications between the PSU and the CPU or SM bus that has it step down in cooperation with the CPU and possibly save even more dollars or help to provide an energy star rating to the entire PC.

But with Multi-GPU based computes on the rise and the PSU makers releasing PSU with even higher wattage ratings each year, I suspect you'll always see an upward trend on your power bill rather than a decrease. Look at all the 1000 watt supplies that were released to the market last year! Runing your PC now burns 1KWH and has a noted impact on your billing!

 

[Warrior]

i been wondering what the increase on my power bill was going to be when i first bought my PC Power and Cooling PSU, I came from a huge upgrade from a antec 430 true Power. i hope its nothing

 

[GonzoP]

When I use to fold 24/7/365 compared to now that I only turn my PC on when I'm actually sitting in front of it yes it makes a bit of a difference in the electric bill $20-25 something like that

 

[unclewebb]

Look at all the 1000 watt supplies that were released to the market last year! Runing your PC now burns 1KWH and has a noted impact on your billing!

Whether you have a power supply rated to deliver a maximum of 400 watts, 600 watts or even 1000 watts makes no difference. A power supply only delivers as much power as your computer needs. Your comments are nonsense.

 

[unclewebb]

They are also meant to reduce noise since the cpu fan slows down also on compatible boards. CnQ runs my Athlon 64 at 1200mhz when idle and slows the fan to 1000rpm.

If CnQ works for you that's great but it's not necessary.

I tried CnQ but turned it off. There's a problem with CnQ where it doesn't bring the CPU back up to full clock speed quick enough which in my opinion made my computer feel sluggish. My laptop uses Intel Speedstep and it's much quicker at returning to full speed after being idle.

With an Athlon64, there's no real reason to use CnQ. It only reduces your core temperature at idle by a couple of degrees and your core temp is low enough at idle already that lowering it another couple of degrees is pointless.

What a person really needs is a program like SpeedFan which lets you control the speed of your cpu fan based on the temperature of your cpu core. No use having your CPU fan spinning crazily making noise if your CPU doesn't need to be cooled. SpeedFan lets you run your CPU at full speed, all the time, while also allowing you to reduce your fan speeds to a near silent level at idle or you can even turn your cpu fan off. Believe it or not, a single core A64 doesn't need a fan for light duty internet use, even when over volted and overclocked to the max. Best of all, you don't need a compatible motherboard or special AMD drivers and settings when using SpeedFan.

http://www.almico.com/speedfan429.exe