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."

Comments

Get Laptops or smaller

[Salvance]

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.

I just did some research on this actually

[casualsax3]

A few weeks ago I tested some power supplies to see if it's worth spending $70 on a power supply vs the crappy stock PSU that comes with a lot of cases you can find on NewEgg.

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.

Re:No your math is wrong (follow up)

[Darkfred]

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.

Re:No Kidding

[ashitaka]

No, they can actually be fully "shut down".

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.