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The Power Consumption of Modern PCs
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."
You mean buying the highest end power consuming gear raises the power consumption of the device as a whole?
NO WAI! Nice ad laden "story" though... [and yes, I flipped through it].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I think the author of this article tried conserving energy by not using spell check.
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.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
PCs should be made with their own coal-fired generators (nuclear reactors for the high-end). That's my rightwing opinion.
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.
PCs should be powered by a digester fueled by the blood of our enemies.
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 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
Power supplies tested: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82 E16817256001
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82 E16817371006
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82 E16817151022
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82 E16817234002
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.
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.
You should pick up a meter from home depot, you plug it between the computer and the wall it has a small window with a dial ticking off the KWh.
----- 70% of all statistics are completely made up.
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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.
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.
----- 70% of all statistics are completely made up.
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?
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 comparison, I happened to plug in my old Circa 1996 PPro 200 to a power meter about a week ago. It ate up about 60-70 watts at idle. My Circa 2002 AMD XP2000+ machine with onboard sound, and LAN eats up about 110-120 watts at idle.
AccountKiller
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 only government got out of the way, PCs could be powered by watch batteries. That's my libertarian opinion.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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 1300SF, the lighting accounts for 25% of my electric. Now, that's with 32W T8 lamps, but the light level is easily 2x that of a residential building, is on 10-11 hours per day, and lights the entire space. And my electric bill is only about $120 at the office. To do that in a single incandescent fixture would require 900W of lamps, run 12 hours a day, 30 days per month. Yikes.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My 1.83Ghz Core Duo iMac has a very low power consumption. See here. 64w under heavy load and 48w idle. If I put it in sleep I'd expect 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.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
.. 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.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
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
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
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Except a computer that is running 24 hours a day is not a minor contribution to your electricity consumption.
I'd love to save some power! :P
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
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
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, let alone the chipset, GPU, or CPU.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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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
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Anything above the absolute bottom of the barrel will run Aero just fine. Something like an integrated Gefore 6100, 6150, 6200, 7300TC or a radeon X200M or X1150. Those cards will barely sip a couple of watts more than the lowest end intel integrated graphics chip. Troll. This article wasnt about Vista
> Despite its flaws, Vista will probably muscle its way into the market eventually.
Perhaps.
> They'll probably stop supporting XP any day now.
Nope. They are supporting it until 2014.
> Dell will stop selling XP soon I'm sure.
True. Everything's Vista now on their ready-to-build machines. You can still find XP on their Outlet PCs and laptops.
How much electrity do you use per year? 10000KWh? 20000KWh?
:)
I recently reduced power consumption of my server, which runs 24/7 by 20W (100W=>80W). That saves about 6.7% of my yearly bill. And now you tell me cutting power usage from 400W to a typical 70W for a laptop under load is not worth doing?
> 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
Now do the maths on the high end system they cite in their test. 186W when idle. My laptop uses about 30W when idle and playing Neverwinter Nights 2 is more than possible with it. Thats 3,7KWh/day in difference. Even with 10000KWh/year of power (which I think is waaaaay too much for a normal household), you "only" use ~27KWh/day. Those 3,7KWh in difference between the laptop and the high end system will save you 14% of your bill. Plus the money you save when buying a normal laptop instead of a high end system.
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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 cool with the stock Intel heatsink/fan. Fairly fast memory was used so the voltage to it did not need to be increased at the faster settings. It is using an AS Rock Conroe 945G DVI motherboard. There's a single 400 gig SATA drive, and just the GMA-950 graphics provided by the Intel chipset. It's definately not for serious gaming, but it works great for HDTV and general use. The OS X effects work.
The BOINC benchmark shows about 1800 MIPS floating point, 4780 MIPS integer (per core). After 4 months, BOINC combined stats show world rank at 94.25% for total credit, 99.1% for recent average credit (scores are even higher for the individual project).
I believe the MacBook uses essentially the same 945G/ICH7 chipset, except the mobile version is designed for lower FSB speeds.
Assembly was considered based on an Asus board with the Intel 975x chipset which could have handled overclocking the FSB (and thus the CPU) much higher than the 945G allows, but saving $200 on a cheaper board, avoiding the cost of a high-end graphics card, avoiding the cost of enhanced cooling, and keeping power consumption low were all factors.
The rule of thumb I use for power cost is $1 a month for every 10 Watts (continuous).
That is based on about $.14 per kilowatt/hr
Saving 100 Watts full time works out to $600 over 5 years!
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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 video card is passively cooled (heatsink!) despite being a nice PCI Express. Stock cooling all around, a nice big ThermalTake case with all kinds of fans -- most of them fairly large.
All in all, it's still a nice, solid gaming rig, and I could probably build another one today with similar power consumption -- I believe the power supply is only some 400w. The trick is to stick just behind the curve, in the sweet spot, where things cost half as much (I'm not making that up!) for maybe 15% less performance, and where they've figured out how to make it cooler, quieter, and more efficient.
After all, we all remember the leafblower video cards, which took up a whole PCI slot just for exhaust. The absolute bleeding edge is pretty much always going to be less efficient, and also somewhat cobbled together. The sweet spot is where it's at.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
80 PLUS rocks. Why can't I do a search for 80 PLUS-certified power supplies on newegg.com? And for some PSUs they sell that are 80 PLUS, Newegg's product page doesn't even tell you.
For example, this Antec EA380 Newegg product page doesn't even mention 80 PLUS, but clicking through to the manufacturer's product page clearly shows the 80 PLUS logo.
C'mon newegg! Get with it!
Humor, no?
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.
Cow Cube
Yes, I was going to do a few more, but hey, if the halfwit mods can't take a joke, why bother?
If only the government made all our computers, we would all still be using a 486 that barely consumes any power at all. That's my communist opinion.
If everyone made their own power, and their own computers, this wouldn't be a problem. That's my anarchist opinion.
If we set up government programs to buy more efficient replacement computers for everyone we could reduce power consumption. That's my socialist opinion.
If only we FNORD the FNORD FNORD, we'd all FNORD. That's my discordian opinion.
And so forth.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Moderation courtesy of MS. Don't say anything negative about vista, it's unpatriotic!!!
Just swallow. And shut the fuck up. That's right.
Here's a little windows app that might help you save a little power. When your machine is idle, it throttles the clock back, which should save a bit of juice (and heat!) http://www.oldskool.org/pc/throttle/
These power bills make me cringe. $100??? $300!?!?!
My one bedroom apartment with its occasionally used dishwasher, electric stove, fridge/freezer, 4 or 5 LED lightbulbs, 25"tv, router, modem, cell phone charger, electric razor, gaming pc & work pc costs me between $16-$24/month.
This is in Albuquerque, NM. I am pretty efficient. I...
1. Never leave things on when not using them and have everything plugged into power strips conveniently placed on TOP of my desks/tv stand so it's easy to flip off the switch so no standby power is ever wasted. It's just a habit now: Shutdown the pc, flip the power switch.
2. Use LED Bulbs
3. Have gas heat/hot water. Don't need AC. The air naturally circulates in the summer due to a heat chimney, plus my part of the building is shaded.
4. Keep my fridge/freezer packed to the brim with old milk jugs full of water.
I've never NOT done any of these things so I don't know what the bill would be if I didn't. Perhaps I should bite the bullet some month and try it out. But I can't imagine having a $100 electric bill. You guys all have hot tubs and the fanciest christmas displays in the county or what? I don't know if my bill would get that high even if I left everything on 24/7 for the entire month.
Am I an anomally? Is my meter broken? I don't know how I'd even get the bill that high if I wanted to.
"They'll probably stop supporting XP any day now."
It's a troll because Microsoft actually has a GOOD record of supporting their OS's for a few years after they've moved to new versions.
When did they end Windows 98 support? Wasn't it in 2006?
According to links from this page mainstream support for XP will end in 2009, and extended support in 2014.
So the original post made a completely false claim that cast FUD. Isn't that a troll by definition?
Nothing new for me. In future power usage will increase. Mobile system's power usage will increase too, but new batteries will be invented
Another possibility is getting all-in-one PCs or some of the mini-form-factor PCs. All-in-ones are typically redesigned laptops with the battery support removed. A good example is the Apple iMac, even the 24"LCD model peaks around 120W when pushing the CPU and GPU at 100%, thrashing the disk, and powering the display at full brightness. Many of the MicroATX kits use low-power components too. There's a British company that makes UPS solutions where the PC can, via USB control, turn-off some of the outlets on it. You could automate the process and cut power to peripherals when not in use and power them up when needed. Hopefully something like it will be available in the states (the British company doesn't make 120V models).
When AMD switched Opteron/Athlon64/Sempron64, power consumption fell, and continues falling.
When Intel got off the P4 chip, power consumption fell.
When 80%+ efficient (consumer) PSUs came out, power consumption fell.
etc.
Power consumption is significantly falling. Unfortunately, many companies are sticking to the slightly cheaper, but vastly more power hungry components, like P4-based Celerons, cheap "500W" 50% efficient Asian PSUs, etc.
You can put together desktop systems today, which are more energy efficient than some of the larger notebooks computers. Unfortunately, only the premium (read: expensive) computer manufacturers are doing that.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Completly turning off a PC isn't practical. I recieve incoming calls via Skype, which requires that I leave my computer on.
Granted, with a few relays, we could make monitors & speakers more efficient. I wired up a 10-amp AC relay to my reciever, which I use to completly turn off my subs and TV when my home theater is off. It saves me about $5 / month! Those of us who are real power misers could just plug our PC monitors into a switched outlet for real savings.
No, I will not work for your startup
On the other hand, if you are going to look at systems, I would guess that the power saved from going from a CRT monitor to a LCD monitor is greater than the extra power consumed by the rest of the system. I'm going to guess that the worst offender is going to be a system from about 2-3 years ago. Likely to still have a CRT monitor, and either a P4/Celeron or an Athlon XP under the hood.
I'm blown away that it's "typical" to have a system that burns 400 watts. In my experience, your CRT monitor will burn more watts than your system will. Then again, my current CRT at work is only burning ~ 60 watts, so that's nowhere near 400. Perhaps my systems are no where near the range of a gaming system.
LCD monitors are much "greener", so that's another plug for the folks promoting laptops too.
Of course efficiency is important. And in my perspective efficiency is considerably good for the latest computers. Every computer or software improvement that's made which increases processing power somewhere around 25% while gaining only a 100 watts in power consumption or some other proportional change is an improvement; there is the volunteer opportunity to use idle processing power on distributed computing projects.
Those candelabra CFLs look dreadful... A lot of fixtures which expose the light bulb are more aesthetic with clear, incandescent bulbs.
I have and use CFLs, but only use them on fixtures that will be turned on and remain on for a long period of time, as every CFL I've seen takes a while to reach full brightness.
My old Dell Poweredge desktop with 17" Sony LCD used about 160 watts during normal use. My new 20" iMac uses less than 70 watts during normal use.
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I should recommend you to my MasterS. Well done, young apprentice.
So what exactly did you measure? From the data, it appears that you simply measured the current in Amps.
This is totally meaningless - as electrical power is not billed for the Amps or Amp-hours that you use, but for the Watt-hours. You even used the kill-a-watt meter, which would have given you a power measurement in Watts (this is what you should have used).
Unfortunately, the current draw of PC PSUs is potentially very a very distorted waveform, which contains lots of harmonics. The result if that the PSU may draw considerably more current (Amps) than it necessarily needs to. More modern PSUs incorporate harmonic reduction systems (also called power factor correction*). The harmonic currents carry no power, but yet can account for 60% or more of the current demand.
The reason why the stock PSU and the 'Winsis' PSU have current consumptions 70% higher than the other PSUs tested is because the other PSUs have harmonic reduction. All PSUs are likely to use a similar amount of total energy and have roughly similar efficiency - the difference is purely due to the existance of the parasitic harmonic currents.
Industrial users (e.g. large office buildings) may be penalised for harmonics (or other causes of low power factor - e.g. inductive or capacitative loads) - but such penalties are considerably cheaper than energy costs.
[*] PC PSUs are not inductive or capacitative. A lot of people seem to think of 'power factor' as 'cos phi'. However, this does not apply for non-linear devices like the rectifier/capacitor front-end in SM PSUs. A typical PC PSU has 'phi' of 0 - yet power factor can be as low as 0.6.
1000x the processing power for 4x the consumption.
Looking the other way, in 16 years, we've reduced the power consumption to computing power by 99.6%.
I still have the graphical versions of WordPerfect 5.1 and 6. Current versions of Word are ugly compared to WP output. I still use WP2000 for annual reports because it's the best and it's hardware requirements are easy.