Power concious? Energy efficient? Seperate machines?

Associate
Joined
30 Apr 2008
Posts
388
Location
Kent, England, UK
Seeing the cost of living is rising, and power bills are not getting any cheaper, rethinking the power our electronics use is rising to the top of the priorities list for many people.

While good gains have been made in the cpu area, graphics cards are not seeing any gains being made in reducing power and increasing performance, in fact power consumption appears to be getting worse, what with the power consumption information about the upcoming nvidia graphics cards. Graphics card linking is also a concern bringing increased power use and a rise in your electric bills.

Of course it all depends how many hours a day you use your machine on full load, but gaming can run into many hours per day if that's what you love doing with your spare time.

Those with consoles will know, you turn them on and off when you want a game, but what about pcs which can require more power than a console? do we forget that they can be left on for much much longer than a console? because they are used for many tasks and are our all in one workhorse.

What I am coming to is asking if any of you have come to a point where power consumption is a big issue for you and if you have a gaming pc which is power hungry that you only use for gaming and turn it on for pc gaming and off when you are done with it.

And if you have another pc which is specifically designed to be energy efficient just for general everyday use including email, browsing, music production, web design, file sorting etc or anything else that can be left on for many more hours which makes sense electricity bill wise.

Electric bills concern me, perhaps they do not for those who are very wealthy but for me, I am considering splitting my PC experience into 2. 1 PC for gaming, and using other more energy efficient parts for a PC for other less power hungry activities.

Thoughts? :)
 
I would assume a graphics card uses far less power in 2d mode then when gaming by looking at the temperatures of the card, same goes for the CPU & we only talking of a couple of hundred Watts or so anyway, it isn't like heating a tank of water.
 
Buying an extra pc will be a large initial outlay that will take years to pay for itself.
The same for the amount of CO2 produced (if you're a O2 counter)
If you want your machine to be mroe energy efficient, you could overclock it, then write down the settings, and only turn it up to the overclocked settings when you need to. Also, enabling things like speedstep will help reduce power consumption.
Having a more powerful PSU than you need will also help with effieiency, because efficiency is usually higher when a PSU is not operating close to its maximum output (also, hipers go bang)
 
Start a protest demanding a nuclear power plant to be created in your area reducing the power bill costs by quite a margin. :p
 
Start a protest demanding a nuclear power plant to be created in your area reducing the power bill costs by quite a margin. :p

Nuclear power is about as carbon neutral as any other power plant, due to the amount of energy that is needed to purify uranium.
 
A bit OTT, a wind generator, solar panels, batteries & migrate to a laptop should suffice. In emergencies there was an exercise bike hooked up to a dynamo to power a laptop on Planet Mechanics last week.
 
My system is consuming 300w (say 273 quid a year 24/7) writing this reply - and I am not running any apps! My laptop is also on and is consuming approx 80w (72 quid a year) using my PC as the server for the (very heavy data processing) dev work that I am doing right now .... that's 200 quid a year difference by my reckoning @ 10.4 ppkwh (about to go up by 20% locally!!)

I tend to only have my main PC on when I want to do something specific like gaming, video stuff or like now. Otherwise I mostly use the laptop (dual core Athlon 64 which cost me 350 quid btw) for browsing and the usual development tasks and have the benefit of a portable computer thrown which is really useful to me. I usually have one or the other switched on.

So, IMHO there is benefit in having a mega PC for games and video conversion and a laptop for other tasks ... but YMMV! In my case the payback is a probably a couple of years (certainly no more than 3) with the added benefits of portability. I now also do not use my PC for streaming to the PS3 since I got the power meter :D Instead I use an external usb drive!

I am currently looking to have a server on the Net permanently and I am looking to get the minimum power usage for this 24/7 setup .. my main PC will NOT be it!
 
Last edited:
Anyone have any statistics on power used during boot up compared to when fully on? I seem to remember (although it may be different now, this was many years ago) that it was more energy efficient to leave a PC on for say 2 hours rather than turn it on, use for 30 mins, off for an hour and back on again for 30 - just due to the fact that everythings sucking power while booting. I imagine technology's a bit better now.

If you're that worried about electricty usage that you might buy another PC then just shower 1 day less a week or something :p.
 
good lord is that how much it costs to keep a highish spec pc on 24-7?

That would be like 20% of my entire power bill (electricity and gas) and thats a family of 4 in a decent sized house??? that can't be right??
 
Rounding it up 250Watt = a unit every 4 hours, 10P a unit & it is correct, not sure if you can game or do heavy CPU work 24/7 though, so when it idles or sleeps it is a different figure.
 
Anyone have any statistics on power used during boot up compared to when fully on? I seem to remember (although it may be different now, this was many years ago) that it was more energy efficient to leave a PC on for say 2 hours rather than turn it on, use for 30 mins, off for an hour and back on again for 30 - just due to the fact that everythings sucking power while booting. I imagine technology's a bit better now.

If you're that worried about electricty usage that you might buy another PC then just shower 1 day less a week or something :p.


This is a myth, along with leaving light bulbs on etc. It'd have to use more power than a 13Amp mains cable could handle if that was correct.
 
One of the worst culprits on a global scale for wasting power actually is mobile phone chargers being left plugged in and turned on. Fact. :p
 
Not for flourescents its not, they require a large surge to fire up, hence the starter module. Your thinking of regular light bulbs.

Yes even for flourescents. The break even time is in the region of 10 seconds, ie if you are going to turn it off to save power it has to be off for 10 seconds or more to be of benefit, anything less and it is cheaper to leave it on. If they had a large current at power up they would be fed with higher rated cables & "fuses" than they are. The surge is of such a short duration (fractions of a second) that it is almost negligible.
 
Back
Top Bottom