power wastage

gobby

i was just wondering how much power a pc eats when its relativly idle.

im asking coz most of my music is on my pc and i usually leave the pc on just to listen to them. am i wasting power or what?

i could always burn some cd's but i would end up with a lot of cd's and i dont really want that. it would be bloody messy!

im running a p4 2ghz with a 300w supply.

Red Alert

To be honest it's not worth worrying about.

The max power is 300w, and it'll probably draw at least half that at all times, which is no more than a bright light bulb.

gobby

Originally posted by Red Alert
To be honest it's not worth worrying about.

good to know man. especially as i seem to be doing this more and more. i always thought it was mad the way a lot of people run servers and leave em going all day. guess its not so bad really...:D

quarryman

you should try this. Its a pretty good search engine.

It gave me this for ya.

:ninja: Ninja!

Mailman

I archived this text which I found on a thread over a year ago


this can be calculated very easily. On the back of every pice of mains equipment is printed the electical rating.

For example, on my monitor it says: 120/220V 2.1A/1.2A
As the supply here is nominally 220V, the Amperage is 1,2A

Multiply 220V x 1.2A =264W (Watts) = 0.264kW

The ESB charge by the kilowatt hour, thats 1000 watts run for an hour. Its about 12c per kWhr, so to run the mointor for an hour would set you back 0.264 x 12c = 3.16c per hour of runtime.

Your PC box can be worked out similarly, (mine is 2A) but bear in mind that the high use items in the PC are the motors on CD drives, hard drives, fans etc,. So actually power consumption
over time would be a lot less than the maximum.

So if you assume that the PC box on average only draws half its max rating, the charge would be 2.64c per hour

All told so about 6c per hour, €1.44 per day, €86.40 per 2 month billing period .

Gerry

If your pc is just playing music, its using about 1% of its cpu. Luckily modern cpu's use very little power if they are not executing instructions, basically they halt until the next one comes in. Similarly 3d graphics cards don't draw a great deal of power while they are just drawing the desktop. So your pc will probably draw a good bit less than half of its maxiumum power draw in this situation.

gobby

thats great guys. thanx a mill.....

never gonna turn my pc off now....

Mailman

Other issue is that the PC is a fire hazard.
On one of my PCs which was left on continuously the fan on the Graphics card went.
On another the PSU burnt out and the cables started burning.

Greenman

My PC is on alot but if I go out are am doing something else I manually switch off the monitor!!! I think that saves something.

gobby

My PC is on alot but if I go out are am doing something else I manually switch off the monitor!!! I think that saves something.

i do that a lot too. thing is i kinda have to. i got my monitor second hand and when it goes into standby mode it makes a very high pitch noise. its not really loud or anything but it goes through my skull. hence, i manually turn it off quite a bit....