But that's cr@p though. A GTX 280 uses 25w at idle and frankly 79 at idle takes the mick. By it's very definition it's doing nothing and should be using far less!
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Real power draw of a PC, results from my own PC
- Thread starter Stonedofmoo
- Start date
But that's cr@p though. A GTX 280 uses 25w at idle and frankly 79 at idle takes the mick. By it's very definition it's doing nothing and should be using far less!
I am guessing because the psu is not healthy, I don't know what i am talking about when it comes to electricity though, I will have a new psu tomorrow so we will see... its worrying. what i mean by "off" is computer shut does with 1 motherboard led still on.
Man of Honour
Yes. LCD's use a lot less power.
How on earth do you reckon 25w at idle? Try doubling it. 50w at idle is what a GTX280 draws. It still has work to do, as in displaying what you are looking at on the screen. You also seem to forget that a 4870x2 is basically two cards in one. With two cores it's going to draw more power. Even Sli'd 9800GTX's draw a lot more power than an X2 at idle let alone Sli'd GTX260's or 280's.
Associate
you cant have it drawing 40w more than a 8800 and only using 25w at idle.. unless your 8800 has its own generator... that would be handy
Are the Zalman drive bays good liars then? My rig is similar and all stock atm. Sat on the internet, nothing else and the Zalman displays 230W.
Clearly. I suggest you buy a meter that measures the power draw from the socket or you need to enable speedstep/eist
On paper a 280GTX should only draw 5w more than a 8800GT, but I found it drew 10w more with one monitor connected and 40w more with 2 connected.
Nvidia lists the idle power consumption of a 280 GTX as 25w. That's the draw of the card, not the whole PC
On paper a 280GTX should only draw 5w more than a 8800GT, but I found it drew 10w more with one monitor connected and 40w more with 2 connected.
Nvidia lists the idle power consumption of a 280 GTX as 25w. That's the draw of the card, not the whole PC
ignore
Well I've managed to undervolt my chip and I've setup two profiles in my BIOS. One at stock speeds but undervolted for daily uses, and another with my overclocked settings. My Q6600's default vid is 1.265v but I manged to undervolt mine to 1.025v and still be Prime95 stable.
With my new profile my setup is:
My PC is as follows
Q6600 @ stock speed but 1.025v in the BIOS
8Gb RAM
MSI P45 Neo2 Motherboard
Asus 8800GT gfx @ stock
3x WD RE3 250Gb drives in RAID0
1x Samsung 1Tb drive
Creative XFi Fatality with drive bay
1x 200mm, 4x 120mm LED case fans
1x DVD-RW
Hiper 630w PSU (recent 85% efficient model)
All that idles at 136w. As you can see from my opening post thats down from 167w, a saving of 31w while still running my whole computer at it's stock speeds. I'm dead pleased with that
and check out the core temps. Thats while running Prime95!!
Damn good for a 'hot' running Q6600
With my new profile my setup is:
My PC is as follows
Q6600 @ stock speed but 1.025v in the BIOS
8Gb RAM
MSI P45 Neo2 Motherboard
Asus 8800GT gfx @ stock
3x WD RE3 250Gb drives in RAID0
1x Samsung 1Tb drive
Creative XFi Fatality with drive bay
1x 200mm, 4x 120mm LED case fans
1x DVD-RW
Hiper 630w PSU (recent 85% efficient model)
All that idles at 136w. As you can see from my opening post thats down from 167w, a saving of 31w while still running my whole computer at it's stock speeds. I'm dead pleased with that
and check out the core temps. Thats while running Prime95!!
Damn good for a 'hot' running Q6600
Also the difference between Prime95 @ 3.5Gig, 1.4v and Prime95 @ 2.4Gig, 1.025v is 110w!!
3.5Gig = 292w
2.4Gig = 181w
3.5Gig = 292w
2.4Gig = 181w
That's good work Stonedofmoo, thats what I call finding the true VID kinda!My Q6600's default vid is 1.265v but I manged to undervolt mine to 1.025v and still be Prime95 stable.
All that idles at 136w. As you can see from my opening post thats down from 167w, a saving of 31w while still running my whole computer at it's stock speeds. I'm dead pleased with that
That is real low volts for a 65nm quad core? are you nice and confident that is stable? I've had Prime95 run the Small FFTs test for 12 hours + while really running low volts which was sweet however after a few days of normal uses I ran into randon issues, a reboot out the blue, a freeze etc etc, all very rare but still enough to undermine my confidence that the system was truely stable (even though Prime was passing). Eventually I started bumping vCore a tiny bit (a few micro notches) and found any odd errors disappeared!
You may or may not find this info useful but thats how the undervolting experience worked out for me . . .
It does beg the question though why Intel® give most of their Core™2 processors an artificially high VID in the first place?
It's no wonder how people got so excited about Intel® Core™2 processor overclocking like champs even using stock volts (i.e inflated VID) . . . It appears to be that the chips are being over-volted in the first place!
That's a huge lump wattage, I discovered this myself a while back when I was building an overclocked Q6600 machine and plugged it into a wattage meter, real eye opener and was one of the main reasons I lost interest in high end overclocking . . . i.e there is no such thing as a free lunch
It's a great buzz to unleash some extra performance from any piece of hardware but once you get a wattage meter and understand whats going on with the power draw (and running costs) the huge overclock buzz wears off!
Would be interesting for you to use that machine running undervolted at 2400MHz for a while and see how the experience is. Have you set-up the memory to run at DDR2-1066MHz as I imagine four cores running at 2400MHz could use a lot of bandwidth?
Look forward to youir feedback anyway and have fun!
Hi there
Basically I kept dropping the voltage until the system BSOD'd in windows. I then put the voltage up 2 notches to 1.025v as it was below the 1v mark at that point. Since then theres been no crashes and it runs Prime95 with no problems while watching some MKV HD movies on my TV.
To be honest this is all I need it for. When I want to play a game I can unleash the overclocked profile and wack it back up to 3.5Gig. That's the beauty of this system, the potential is there it's just untapped for 99% of the time as I don't play games that often nowadays.
I suspected my chip would let me run a low VID because I could overclock this chip to 3133Mhz on stock volts which is a massive increase. I didn't quite expect as much as it did however. The memory has defaulted to DDR2-800 and I've left it there along with 1.8v and reasonably timings of 15-5-5-5.
The only possibility that is left now is too considering underclocking the rest of the boards voltages, that might be going too far
I was going to buy a Q9550 but now I'm not so sure. I can't imagine the power drain would be much less with the 45nm process as my PC is still full of hard disks and fans plus that 8800gt.
Basically I kept dropping the voltage until the system BSOD'd in windows. I then put the voltage up 2 notches to 1.025v as it was below the 1v mark at that point. Since then theres been no crashes and it runs Prime95 with no problems while watching some MKV HD movies on my TV.
To be honest this is all I need it for. When I want to play a game I can unleash the overclocked profile and wack it back up to 3.5Gig. That's the beauty of this system, the potential is there it's just untapped for 99% of the time as I don't play games that often nowadays.
I suspected my chip would let me run a low VID because I could overclock this chip to 3133Mhz on stock volts which is a massive increase. I didn't quite expect as much as it did however. The memory has defaulted to DDR2-800 and I've left it there along with 1.8v and reasonably timings of 15-5-5-5.
The only possibility that is left now is too considering underclocking the rest of the boards voltages, that might be going too far
I was going to buy a Q9550 but now I'm not so sure. I can't imagine the power drain would be much less with the 45nm process as my PC is still full of hard disks and fans plus that 8800gt.
Strange - While having my power meter plugged in i wanted to see how much difference eist (Speedstep) made - It didnt seem to affect stability, which was nice, and knocked my clock down from 3.12Ghz to 2.0Ghz.
Know how much juice that saved? 1 watt... i kid you not... 1 single, solitary miserable watt
Even underclocking the 8800GT to less than 1/2 speed only saved 5 watts - might try undervolting the CPU, but I cant see it saving a lot, seeing as my idle is only 101W.
I've figured this out.
You're measuring what the PSU is pulling from the wall.
I'm measuring what my PSU is supplying to my PC.
Big difference.
Man of Honour
I've figured this out.
You're measuring what the PSU is pulling from the wall.
I'm measuring what my PSU is supplying to my PC.
Big difference.
Quite. Our way with the Zalman is far more accurate as it's only the pc and not everything else.
Soldato
only as far as what the components pull from the psu. it doesnt tell you what individual components pull and it doesnt tell you what the whole pc pulls either. Its far from idea and at least by sticking a meter between the wall socket and the pc you know what its actually taking/costing to power that pc.
Man of Honour
The Zalman reads the power from the rear of the psu so it is total pc power consumption. You plug the psu power dongle into a socket in a sensor box. The box then has two leads coming out of it. One is the power lead that goes to the rear of the psu and the other is a lead that goes to the Zalman multifunction device and displays the power that the psu is drawing.
If you have a power monitor on the wall socket, unless all you have is the tower plugged in it will display the power consumption of the tower and whatever else is connected. The Zalman displays the pc's power consumption and nothing else.
Soldato
ooooh i misunderstood what it measured
well, if people want to know the draw of the pc only, whos going to do that? lol.
Well then it does exactly what the power meter we has does. It measures one device at a time so clearly it's just going to show me what an individual device uses unless I attach a 4 way socket too it and power multiple devices through there.
Does it also show the results in kWh, volts, amps etc?
Man of Honour
Of course it does'nt. You know full well that it is'nt designed to do that. What it also does is control fans and monitor temps. I also have a plug in power monitor but the only problem i have is that i only have a single socket so everything is plugged into it.
I do know how much every electrical item in the house uses though.