low power consuming pc needed..

ants83

ants83

ants83

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Joined
29 Jun 2004
Posts
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soon to be moving out so will look to save on the old leccy bill.
at mo i have.
corsair 750w psu
i7920 at 4.0ghz with 12gb ram
5560ti 2gb
4 hard drives (2ssds)

i play the odd game but mainly browse/download with the odd bit of converting too.

any help chaps?
 
Tohrazer said:
im not entirely convinced the money you save on electric will be worth the hardware investment in honesty
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yes quite possibly correct. Although now would be a good time to upgrade as i have spare money and it would be future proof for years, even though my current rig is still decent.
 
If you only download and browse you could probably make do with a NAS to do your downloads and an iPad or nexus to control it and do your internet browsing..
 
The i7 920 is still a very decent CPU, especially at 4GHz, your GPU isn't particularly power hungry, and therefore the only area where you might save on energy consumption is with a more efficient PSU (but I don't know how efficient your current one is).

If you want to save on electricity then make sure you turn out the lights when you're not in the room, use energy saving bulbs if you can stand the rubbish light quality and only boil as much water as you need in the kettle. Your PC consumes very little energy in the scheme of things.
 
Havana_UK said:
use energy saving bulbs if you can stand the rubbish light quality
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LED bulbs are great quality albeit rather expensive at £8-£10+ each. They are also even lower consumption than the traditional energy saving bulbs.

But you should save in the long term since they only use 5W (or 10 if you need a much brighter one). I have heard some can be worse than others so it could require a bit of shopping around.
 
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zyzzyzus said:
LED bulbs are great quality albeit rather expensive at £8-£10+ each. They are also even lower consumption than the traditional energy saving bulbs.

But you should save in the long term since they only use 5W (or 10 if you need a much brighter one). I have heard some can be worse than others so it could require a bit of shopping around.
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I supply £2M-£3M worth of LED components & modules a year to lighting manufacturers. I wouldn't apply the phrase "great quality" to many of the LED retrofits that you can buy today!
 
It was the electrician that told us about switching to LED bulbs and he did say to buy 1 first to see since quality can vary massively between brands. I prefer them to the other energy saving ones

In any event, they are the best efficiency you can get and use a lot less than even other energy saving ones.
 
zyzzyzus said:
It was the electrician that told us about switching to LED bulbs and he did say to buy 1 first to see since quality can vary massively between brands. I prefer them to the other energy saving ones

In any event, they are the best efficiency you can get and use a lot less than even other energy saving ones.
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LEDs are great alternatives for certain applications and quality varies massively, even within brands. Don't expect to be rich from the energy saving though. On the assumption that you replace a 50W Halogen GU10 with a 7W LED GU10 and both were to spend 4 hours per day, every day, switched on you would save about £7.50 per year in energy costs. A good quality retrofit LED GU10 will cost ~£15-£20, so they'll be paying for themselves in 2-3 years (assuming they're still working!).
 
Why not buy, or better still borrow, a plug-in power meter?

Then you can see what your PC is actually drawing from the wall in use, as the Intel i-series are very power efficient when not actually processing. My upgrade to a generation 3 i5 from a 1st-gen i3 actually uses less electric, despite having 2x the cores and a higher clock speed!

Do you need to run both HDD's, or could you make do with or change to a single larger disk? That'd save on electric, but it really is tweaking around the edges, unless you're running the thing 24x7?
 
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