PC Power Consumption

A

AeriaGloris

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
384
Can someone give me a rough idea of how much power my pc uses? I'm trying to work out how much it costs to leave it on overnight, running azureus only.

Here are my specs:

Engermax noisetaker 475w psu
a64 winchester 3500 with cool n' quiet enabled
msi k8n neo 2 platinum
nvidia geforce 4 ti 4600
1 gb crucial balistix pc4000
samsung spinpoint 250gb
audigy 2 zs

All at stock speeds and air cooled.
 
Well the CPU has a spec'd thermal design power of 67 watts... the video card about 25 watts.

SpinPoint P120 250GB SATA pulls 9.5 watts while seeking typically... not sure on the rest.

But lets say you're pulling 150 watts total during typical operation, which I think is a high estimate for your system. You have to figure in the efficiency of your PSU. That's a bit harder since rarely is efficiency specified, and when it is, its usually exaggerated.

Its likely a 150 watt system would be pulling.. ohh... 230 watts from the mains. Probably less, probably not much more with a decent Enermax PSU like you have.
 
May be of some use

Depending on how must the graphics card is actually drawing, probably anywhere from 50-75W DC load at idle.
The Noisetakers have always been very efficient power supplies, maintaining close to 75% efficiency even at very light load -
so a worst case AC power draw is probably about 100W, best case about 65W.

I'm not sure if the graphics cards can be put in a low power state just by turning the monitor off (might need to go to standby for that which you don't want to do if you're running bit torrent), but if it could that figure might be as low as 50W AC.
 
When my wife recommends that we turn off the 4 PC's that I have running Folding@Home, I remind her that they only draw about as much as a light bulb each. This is stretching it a bit, but it keeps her happy and me folding.

If I may add to your question, does turning off the monitor result in less power required to the video card?
 
upriverpaddler said:
If I may add to your question, does turning off the monitor result in less power required to the video card?
Click to expand...
No. But not running 3D apps certainly does. The vast majority of the circuits in a modern GPU only light up when 3D processing is going on. Just watch the temp graph in RivaTuner or whatever and this will immediately make sense. Video cards don't draw nearly as much power in 2D only mode. On that note, I'm thinking Microsoft's fancy 3D accellerated interface in Longhorn may be a bad idea. We should sick Greenpeace and the Sierra club on them. Maybe PETA too... more power draw = hampster has to run faster. :p

edit: Though it does reduce the power draw of the monitor...
 
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