Tell me why I have to be a PowerSlave?

[f0dder]

Okay, so I just went out and bought a power meter thingy today. You know, one of those things that plugs into a wall socket, and lets you plug other things into them. It can display current Watt consumption, as well as measure Watt consumption over time, keeping track of min/max/average...

So, here's a few stats for your amusement.

Computer specs:

[Select]

ASUS A8N SLI Premium
Antec Neo HE550EC PSU
4x512meg Corsair TWIN2X1024A-6400 memory (PC800 DDR2 RAM)
Socket 939 AMD64x2 4400+ (2.2GHz, rated 110W max)
GigaByte GV-NX76T256D-RH (passively cooled GF7600GT/256meg GDDR3)
Western Digital Raptor, 74gig, 10.000rpm SATA drive
LiteOn LH-20A1S-10C, 20x SATA DVD-RW burner
2x120mm casefans

Computer, turned off: ~6W (need to flip PSU switch to get 0W!)
Computer, standby: ~9W
Computer, on & idle: ~153W
Computer, 1 core maxed out: ~187W
Computer, 2 cores maxed out: ~203W
Locate32 indexing, ~3-7% CPU usage: ~160W

Furthermore, my WAG300N-EU combined ADSL2+ modem+router / 4 port 100mbit switch / wireless access point draws ~6.8W, and my 5-port NetGear GS105 gigabit switch draws around 6W.

I'll return later with stats on my TFT monitors

[f0dder]

Btw: for my fileserver, I go from 77W to 63W on idle if I power down the two 400gig sata drives when not needed (keeping just the system disk spinning). That's around 7W per disk... Yeah, I know, spin-up and spin-down is a lot of wear and tear, so it's not something you should do several times per day.

[justice]

actually according the the uk's http://carbon trust wear and tear is neglible and you should power down your pc whenever your not using it 

[f0dder]

justice: wear and tear on the components as a whole, probably, I doubt turning your box on/off a few times a day will make anything fry before you'd normally replace it anyway. But I'm still weary of the wear&tear by parking drive heads, the force of spinning up the platters, etc... all other components can be replaced, just some stupid $$$ you have to spend, but harddrives contain valuable data that can't be replaced.

[Deozaan]

actually according the the uk's http://carbon trust wear and tear is neglible and you should power down your pc whenever your not using it 

-justice (December 08, 2007, 07:54 PM)

Just the name "Carbon Trust" is enough to make me discredit just about anything it says in the name of carbon emission reduction.

[Ralf Maximus]

Most of the computers that have failed on me did so during power-up.  It's been a rare experience that something went *poof* and quit working while I was using it.

So either the hardware's failing during shut-down (possible), has mysteriously failed while it's off (unlikely), or the stress of powering it on pushes an internal part beyond limit (probable).

And now I have jinxed every piece of equipment I own.  What's the Murphy's Law Cleansing Ritual again?

[Renegade]

What? No Powerslave allusions yet?

I know what it's like though... My electricity bill is insane. But I'm still too stubborn to turn off my computers. I hate rebooting.

[f0dder]

I know what it's like though... My electricity bill is insane. But I'm still too stubborn to turn off my computers. I hate rebooting.

-Renegade (December 15, 2007, 10:42 PM)

Standby helps. Obviously it's no good if I'm on IRC/whatever, but I've started using standby when I'm leaving the computer for some time period, after all it's only 3W more than turning it off... and waking up from standby is fast. When I'm away for a long period (like, sleeping, going to work, or anything longer), it's a full shutdown and flipping the power switch on the PSU.

It's actually been a lot less of a bother than I would have expected it to

[f0dder]

A little update: I thought setting "Minimal Power Management" in control panel -> power options was enough to activate my CPU's power saving features, but apparently you still need the Processor Driver from AMD.

With that installed, the aforementioned power management profile selected, and Cool&Quiet enabled in the BIOS, my idle power consumption went from ~107W to ~97W. (Yes, the 107W is higher than the previous idle usage I reported, but I've added a second raptor drive and a second DVD burner). Not bad.

With the Amd Clock utility (also downloadable from the page above), you can even see the current speed of the cores... they're clocked down to 1000MHz on idle, instead of the full 2200MHz under load.

[Lashiec]

f0dder, any instance of sound scratchiness while doing things in the computer and you have some music playing in the background? (in a audio player, of course )

[f0dder]

f0dder, any instance of sound scratchiness while doing things in the computer and you have some music playing in the background? (in a audio player, of course )

-Lashiec (December 25, 2007, 04:56 PM)

Humm, haven't used my computer for MP3 playback after I moved to XP64... are you thinking wrt. the raptor drives or the CoolNQuiet stuff? Iirc there weren't any audio glitches when I played with it under XP32 years back.

[Lashiec]

No, regarding the Cool'n'Quiet driver, it used to cause sound scratchiness a while ago, now it's not causing any problem. It seems to work at random... I researched the Internet back and forth in search for the cause and the solution, but I only found the (possible) cause. Thank goodness it was fixed by itself (it'll come back to haunt me tomorrow, just to piss me off ), but it remains one of those unresolved computing bugs, just like the one with the Lite-On drives (going offtopic...)

[Fred Nerd]

Considering that my laptop uses about 60w maximum (rated on the sticker on the bottom, not measured), I think that is quite a significant power saving.  Very neccessary in an alternative household, we rely on solar power which is not very forgiving on cloudy days.

[f0dder]

Yeah, laptops do draw a lot less power than a full-blown PC. When running on AC current, the ones I'm currently fixing up draw ~77W while charing, iirc ~40W when fully charged and running, and "very little" while standby/poweroff but connected.

Interestingly enough, when the power brick is plugged in but not connected to a laptop, it draw 0.0W. Since there's power transformation in power bricks, I didn't expect 0W usage...

[f0dder]

Seems like I'm not the only person bitching over power consumption

[f0dder]

And let's crosslink yet another DonationCoder thread about power consumption: Where does the power go when I save it?.