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Power draw to cost to run

ChrisLandin

ChrisLandin

ChrisLandin

Associate
Joined
10 Jun 2009
Posts
2,225
Location
Darlington
Hey all,

A few questions for you guys in the know.

For the last couple of days ive been bitcoin mining on my htpc in the front room,

Ive made over a coin and have just sold the complete coin for a tenner.

Now what im after is a rough idea of what its costing me for my pc to be running 24/7

Spec is as follows

Q8400 (stock)
Matx asus mobo
4gb ram
hd 5850 x 1 (800 core)
a ssd
h50

does anybody have the working out solution ie wattage, kilo watts price etc or whatever the hell it is?

please no bit coin bashin im only having a play with it and i would just like to know how much cash ive allready lost with electric haha

Cheers
 
300W maybe

100W CPU (maybe less I don't know)
30W mATX board
10W 4GB RAM
150W 5850 (maybe more if overclocked)

Plus a watt here and there for your pump and fans.

300W will burn 7.2kwh per day. 12p (about this) per kwh means your PC costs some 86p per day. Call it a quid a day.

If it took you 2 days to make a coin then I suppose you are still £8 up on the deal.

Kind of shows that it might be worth it at the moment, although I'm not so sure about these folk who are buying multiple cards just to mine coins faster.
 
ChrisLandin said:
Cheers pal. How do you work out the watts to kwh please?
Click to expand...

Easy 1 kwh is 1000 watts. So if your PC uses 300 watts per hour it will take 2 hours and 23 minutes to use 1000 watts (assuming liner usage, in the real world you PC spends most of its time at idle so usage will be a lot less and when gaming it will much higher).

Radoen HD5850 review. The bulk of electric will be consumed by the video card followed by your CPU, in this review a Core I7 920 O/C, HD5850 uses 141 watts at idle which means it will take 7 hours to burn a full kw and 315 odd at load, your system might use a bit less since the CPU runs lower so Tealc's rough guide of 300 watts is spot on.

If your worried about power draw just make sure all the power saving option are enabled on your motherboard and in the CCC control panel.
 
Hmm I'd hazard a guess my system would not be worth doing this on lol I've gone for all the most wasteful components powerwise
 
bemaniac said:
Hmm I'd hazard a guess my system would not be worth doing this on lol I've gone for all the most wasteful components powerwise
Click to expand...

maybe not as your 2 graphics cards should mine quicker (dunno if thats the term) so you will make 1 coin faster. so in theory you could be making a coin (£10 in this example) a day, so £70 a week isnt bad, im sure you dont spend that on electric a week. if you do then you probably have enough money not to go to the effort for an extra £70 a week.
 
Cheers for that my man. Maths was never a strong point for me. So I guess the quid a day mark is not to shabby so making a canny little bit of profit from it just now. Obviously time will be a telling factor here but for the odd bit of mining it pays for itself at least.

Ive been reading of people building mining rigs with multiple 6990's in them, for the price I wonder if they will ever break even??
 
bemaniac said:
Hmm I'd hazard a guess my system would not be worth doing this on lol I've gone for all the most wasteful components powerwise
Click to expand...

Your wasting your time with 480s anyhow pal. I have 2 in my gaming rig and they get massively outpermormed by my 5850. Go figure!!

At mining anyhow:p
 
ChrisLandin said:
Your wasting your time with 480s anyhow pal. I have 2 in my gaming rig and they get massively outpermormed by my 5850. Go figure!!

At mining anyhow:p
Click to expand...

Its well known that if your mining ATI cards seem much better at this Task, I guess its like Nvidia and FSX Nvid cards perform much better in FSX.... i guess its just how they do things. Either way bit coin mining is not worth it tbh (ok if you already have the hardware) but the value of coins goes down all the time and your running your Gcard flat out all the time so not that good for it in the long run
 
Just to ask as this peeked my interest as my unit is on 24/7 365. I have had a bit of a google regarding bit coins but I'm still not 100% what it is. Is this some sort of WOW or like monetary thingy or is it data farming like folding?
 
I looked into this a little and as follows really... Currently a 6990 will earn you about 0.8 of a coin a day give you about £60 a week but the difficulty of earning coins changes about every week (by a lot, like 50%). If I could invest say £10,000 today I would most probably make that money back over the next year, but only just! Shame I didn't know about this last year, I could have made a lot of money :S As it happens it only looks worth doing if you already have the hardware or if the 7xxx series more than doubles the performance of the 5xxx/6xxx series. Which it wont..
 
My findings, total system draw from the socket:

Load test of Furmark 1080p 4xAA

5770 crossfire idle = 185w
5770 crossfire load = 350w - 27/74/51 - 71ºC
5770 single idle = 175w
5770 single load = 260w (90w per card) - 22/37/26 - 63ºC
5850 idle = 190w
5850 load = 310w (145w per card) - 40/68/48 - 70ºC
5850 775/1100 load = 315w - 43/72/51 - 72ºC
5850 crossfire idle = 200w
5850 crossfire load = 420w - 79/132/94 - 74ºC
 
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