How many Watts do you really use?

[PiKe]

We have 6-7-800watt power supplies but do we really need them? I'm working on a Quad Q6600 with 5 hard drives and a 7100GS graphics card and at idle it's using 162 Watts, when the CPU is 100% loaded it uses only 60 watts more.

What do your PC's typically use if you have any way to measure them?

 

[willthepirate]

try loading a top end graphics card

 

[LadFromWales]

you could use one of those plug in meters, get them from the big cheap grocery stores.

Power supplies aren't 100% efficient, as such actual draw from the plug will be higher than the draw of the components.

Hard drives use lots of power to spin up, after this, idle and seek power consumption variation is negligable. Same with RAM.
A high end graphics card or three will use a lot more power running under load than they do idling on the desktop.

The only measurements I've done with my systems is turning everything off and doing some maths involving the spinny disc on my leccy meter...that and the fact that firing up a game causes the second load LED to come on, on my APC UPS.

 

[PiKe]

The only measurements I've done with my systems is turning everything off and doing some maths involving the spinny disc on my leccy meter...that and the fact that firing up a game causes the second load LED to come on, on my APC UPS.

I'm using the PowerChute software to get my numbers from.

 

[Audigex]

The main thing often isn't the voltage, but the current accross the 12v rail(s)

A mate of mine just removed a 500W supply from his system because he wasn't happy that the +12v rail only had 16A and he was upgrading his graphics card and wanted at least 22A.

If you don't have sufficient current going through one or more rails, you'll get instability even if you're only using a fraction of the total energy (wattage) the supply can provide.

 

[Ghost-Reaper]

My system draws about 450watts idle and nearly 600 on load.

 

[MikeHunt79]

around 250W

 

[shadowscotland]

[email protected]@1.45w(stock)+Ip35pro+raptor+seagate+8500GT+enermax liberty+passive water loop
82w idle 120w load (cpu)

[email protected]@1.4w+Ip35pro+raptor+seagate+8500GT+enermax liberty+passive water loop
90w idle 143w load (cpu)

[email protected]@1.4w(stock)+P5Q+raptor+seagate+8500gt+Xfi+Yesico fanless+passive loop
95w idle 135w load (cpu)

[email protected]@1.1w+P5Q+raptor+seagate+8500gt+Xfi+Yesico fanless+passive loop
87w idle 128w load (cpu)

P5Q uses more juice than IP35pro, but allows lower Vcore
All watts are at wall (I've one of thoses plug in meters)

 

[fish99]

System in my sig uses 100W browsing the web and just over 200W when gaming (not including monitor which uses another 50W).

 

[J.B]

I measure my Athlon 5200 x2 based system booting up and general word and web usage with a 22" monitor and it was sitting at around 250-260, thats with a GTX 260 though, 3 HDD and an X-Fi.

My server has a Athlon 4850e in it with onboard GPU and that runs at about 60w

 

[Audigex]

Just as an aside, if you know an approximate average for how much power your machine draws from the wall you can quite quickly see how much you're paying to run it for a year. Just multiply the wattage draw by 0.876 and that's the cost in £ approximately.

The maths being
++ wattage * 86400 * 365 = the number of watt-seconds it will use all year (watts x seconds per day x days per year or just wattage * 31536000)
++ then divide by 3600 (60 seconds * 60 minutes per hour) to get the number of watt hours you use per year - equivalent to multiplying wattage by 8760
++ divide that by 1000 to get the total number of kilowatt hours you use per year - equivalent to multiplying by 8.76
++ multiply this by the cost per unit (kwh) of electricity from your provider - perhaps £0.1 (10p) - you can adjust this slightly if you know your exact cost per unit. Just multiply 8.76 by the cost per unit in £

or as an approximate number, 0.876
So J.Bs athlon server above likely costs somewhere in the region of £85-90 a year to run

 

[J.B]

I wanted to underclock it down to about 50 or even 40 total but the mobo doesnt support it! stupid me!should have just bought an Atom based system

 

[Ghost-Reaper]

Just as an aside, if you know an approximate average for how much power your machine draws from the wall you can quite quickly see how much you're paying to run it for a year. Just multiply the wattage draw by 0.876 and that's the cost in £ approximately.

The maths being
++ wattage * 86400 * 365 = the number of watt-seconds it will use all year (watts x seconds per day x days per year or just wattage * 31536000)
++ then divide by 3600 (60 seconds * 60 minutes per hour) to get the number of watt hours you use per year - equivalent to multiplying wattage by 8760
++ divide that by 1000 to get the total number of kilowatt hours you use per year - equivalent to multiplying by 8.76
++ multiply this by the cost per unit (kwh) of electricity from your provider - perhaps £0.1 (10p) - you can adjust this slightly if you know your exact cost per unit. Just multiply 8.76 by the cost per unit in £

or as an approximate number, 0.876
So J.Bs athlon server above likely costs somewhere in the region of £85-90 a year to run

I would rather not do that for mine

 

[kerrgreg]

|rig in sig with 6hdds runs at 190 idle and 435 underload with intel burn and 3dmark vantage running

 

[Audigex]

I wanted to underclock it down to about 50 or even 40 total but the mobo doesnt support it! stupid me!should have just bought an Atom based system

The atom is ridiculously low useage, I've never properly got the hang of mAh and voltage compared to watts, and batterybar doesn't work on it so I can't find out. My laptop is currently discharging at 17W though, and that's running 10 windows plus spotify, a 22" external monitor and about 15 tabs in firefox doing whatever the hell they're doing. Oh and a PCSpim emulator.

Ghost, for the sake of your sanity it's probably not a good idea, no

 

[PiKe]

My EEE, uses 8watts @ 1amp.

 

[JTrickle]

What do your PC's typically use if you have any way to measure them?

Massive thread with test results on this.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17957765&highlight=power

 

[JTrickle]

The atom is ridiculously low useage

Pity its motherboard isnt.

 

[Marky]

I've not measured mine but I have a 600W PSU and I doubt I get anywhere near to that.

 

[Antec Dan]

We have 6-7-800watt power supplies but do we really need them? I'm working on a Quad Q6600 with 5 hard drives and a 7100GS graphics card and at idle it's using 162 Watts, when the CPU is 100% loaded it uses only 60 watts more.

What do your PC's typically use if you have any way to measure them?

Hi PiKe,

Dan from Antec here. We actually have a very useful PSU calculator on our website. It is very detailed and will tell you exactly what wattage you will need.

Check it out: -
http://www.antec.outervision.com/