Power consumption of a PC

gee3000

gee3000

gee3000

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Have a look at the system in my signature, it's run by a 550W power supply. How can I find out how much it costs to run my system? It currently gets on average 5-8 hours use per day (evenings mainly).

I need it to be running 24/7 for file access by siblings, and for myself over the internet. How much would it cost to run it 24/7 for a year?

I'm also hoping to add 1 or 2 more 1.5tb WD Green HDD's in there for storage, would this bump the power consumption/running cost by a great deal?

Should I consider building a separate low power system with HDD rack for the storage and streaming? ie. a 120W M-ITX PC? Or would it be okay for me to leave my computer on all the time?

Apologies for the billion questions, just need clarification :)

Gee.
 
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If you were to leave it running - loose the overclock, could even step it down to ~2.0Ghz

depends on how much you pay for your electricity but if the system is just for file access then it will be idle most of the time pulling i woulod say ~ 150-200W
 
It's worth getting a plug in power meter (£10-20) to check the actual use of the PC and accessories. I found my speakers were using 25W when quiet!

Most of my PCs seem to run 100-200W on idle, but one I've got uses less by using a low power graphics card, fewer drives and underclocking. Overall though for a machine that you still want to use for games the best approach is probably to optimise its power management settings.

Beyond that getting a lower power PC (Atom/M-ITX etc) would be the way to go but the cost of the low power system will pay the greater electricity cost of your current one for quite a while!
 
Kennysevenfold said:
If you were to leave it running - loose the overclock, could even step it down to ~2.0Ghz

depends on how much you pay for your electricity but if the system is just for file access then it will be idle most of the time pulling i woulod say ~ 150-200W
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I would agree with this.
 
Kennysevenfold said:
If you were to leave it running - loose the overclock, could even step it down to ~2.0Ghz

depends on how much you pay for your electricity but if the system is just for file access then it will be idle most of the time pulling i woulod say ~ 150-200W
Click to expand...
I would say you were on the money, here.

I have a Zalman fan controller with the power monitor on (not sure how accurate it is) and my system (no overclock), with c'n'q enabled pulls about 160-180w when 'idling'. I say, idling, but I run boinc, so it depends on what's running. Climate prediction always seems to draw more power than the other projects I run.
 
A seperate system would be an idea, probably second hand stuff for most of it would make it even cheaper.

use a low end CPU, just use 1 stick of ram, and under clock/under volt both if poss.
Use a mobo with integrated graphics, and plug as few fans, optical drives etc as you can get away with, even detach mouse, keyboard and monitor unless you need to directly access it once its up and running.
Maybe even running at a vey low resoloution would also help a bit, after all, its just gonna be serving files.

You should really reserch the HDD's also, as low power is going to be more important than performance.

Would be a fair bit cheaper that leaving that gaming rig ideling 24/7.
 
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Kennysevenfold said:
But how many years would it take of saving electricity would it take to break even and start really saving from the cash spent on the new build. :p
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Well using second hand parts or scrounging bits from crappy pc's that are getting scrapped would make it pretty damn cheap, if you can reduce power consumtion from 200w to under 100w then it will work out quite nice, (think of it like saving a 100w lightbulb turned on 24/7 that you dont need. i thing a big saving can be made just by not having a monitor.
 
Also fewer, bigger HDD's will be better than an array of smaller ones if you think about it, you get more GB per £ and each drive is gonna consum about 8-9 watts so one drive represents about 10% of power consumption an a 100w system.

Also think about power options in BIOS - things like wake on LAN access would leave your PC in standby unless someone wants some files from it.
 
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I recently put together an i7 860 system, 4GB ram, Geforce 260GTX, kinda middle of the road system with enough power for some decent gaming....

Idle power 76 watts! once windows was fully booted up. (140W or so during bootup and dropped 76w as soon as windows was idling). Web browsing and light use the PC was only using 85watts! (measured from the mains socket)
 
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