What????Originally Posted by Top_gun
6 pages into a thread basically about arguing, I make a general comment saying that some people can't be argued with. It is entirely appropriate.
I didn't mention a 970 card, I have nothing against 970 cards, I have no idea who you are talking about. Please don't bother telling me who you are talking about, it just isn't relevant.
One can easily construct a strong case to say you insulted a group of forum members discussing 970 graphic cards. After all, CTTF posted a link to the discussion taking place on the 970 graphics card followed by your perceived insult to them.
Anyway, I shall move back to topic to discuss energy saving.
A couple of days, I was reviewing my electricity billing account and was thrilled to discover I would be paying just £88 for my electricity for the course of 12 months with a supplier. Admittedly, some of the money came from credits through complaints, hitting energy efficiency target, switching energy company and the £12 government energy rebate. However, this figure needs to be put into context when I had an annual electricity bill for £330.
Choosing energy efficiency appliances does work and mean lower energy bills.
Interesting, so, to take out rebates and tariff changes, what was the comparative figures in Kwh for both gas and electricity for the two periods?
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Really now?
From that thread:
He thanked me for the last answer since he was not aware how cheap the R9 290 and GTX780 had gotten and that was with game bundles which do have value.
Now it was followed by this:
It was quite funny since the GTX780 draws less power than the R9 290 anyway,so even if the OP was to game for 30 hours a week for 52 weeks it would not make as much difference as he would have thought.
Valve were running a Core i7 4770 and a higher power consumption Geforce Titan off this PSU:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/450w-...0plus-gold-psu
He also has an 850W PSU too. So it was not a matter of his PSU not being enough - it was a matter of power costs.
He went for a £300 GTX970 too. It might take a while back to get back £100 or potentially £200 savings back in electricity. I would suspect he would have ditched the cards long before then.
Everytime I do the sums for people,funnily all the arguments about lower power consumption,actually never get stated again!
On OcUK - both the R9 290 from last week(and indeed even the GTX780) had big price reductions as hinted by GIbbo and there were game codes being given away which equated to at least £20 to £25 if sold for both models.
Hence,the lower electricity costs saving arguments made little difference in the overall equation especially when the cost saving upfront was near enough £60 to £80 at the time.
A KFA2 GTX780 with UK based RMA can be had for £204 delivered with a free copy of the latest Borderlands game. That means close to £180 after selling the game. The well regarded MSI R9 290 Gaming Edition can be had for £224 delivered with a games bundle that would net you £20 to £30 after selling it,ie,the card is nearly £200. The cheapest GTX970 cards cost around £260 onwards.
Ultimately would I get a GTX970 over a R9 290 if the price difference was not massive - probably. The shorter PCBs are useful for me since I like compact builds,but the lower power consumption is not really a consideration - R9 290 cards are being run off 450W PSUs,and I do nothing but smallish builds.
There are a lot of people(newbies) who do ask for advice and when terms are thrown around like lower power consumption,the actual cost reductions should at least be worked out not vague crap.
Also unlike a lot of people I am very up to date on pricing and bundles too.
Like I said in the OP its about properly targeting where you do spend the money on more efficient parts - with electrical appliances things like fridges,etc do make sense due to them being on 24/7 and potentially last as long as a decade. Spending that extra £100 on a more efficient fridge would probably actually make more difference for example.
So honestly we can argue this until the cows come home or we can agree to disagree.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 18-10-2014 at 10:14 AM.
In my head I thought I would go for a full rackmount quadcore 24gb ram VM monster of ebay (learnage stuff) ...then realised I was on a key meter <cockblocked>
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All the comparative figures for both gas and electricity showed a downward trend in usage for the two periods (Dec to Mar/2013 &2014). So I delved into the historic figures since 2011 and the only time my gas consumption went up and my electricity went down relative to the corresponding period was in 2013 - a very cold winter. I could argue the temperature outside has more of bearing on your gas bill.
I think we can agree to disagree on this one! Value is a matter of opinion.
Also, your calculation doesn't seem to factor in saving standing charges on electricity. From my point of view, I can factor in £45 worth standing charge savings each year as low energy user on a single rate tariff. That's £135 off the cost of a graphics card if you don't upgrade in three years. Plus another £60 in electricity saving. Thus making the grand total of £195 - virtually the cost of a high performing graphics card.
Yes, outside temperature (or to be strictly accurate, the temperature difference between the inside and outside of the house) will have a bearing, and makes year on year comparisons a little unreliable.
However it does perhaps illustrate that the best investment in energy saving measures is improved house insulation, cavity wall, triple glazing, loft and underfloor insulation.
You then have to start getting active measures like using forced ventilation of the house and using heat ex hangers (or heat pumps) to reclaim that heat - which then goes onto return-on-investment calculations.
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CAT-THE-FIFTH (22-10-2014)
In that example that GTX970 cost around £120 more(actually I think it was slightly more) than the GTX780 overall,and the TPU and TH card only measurements(which are quite close) indicated the GTX970 was between +30W to -10W more efficient than a GTX780,and at wall measurements using cheap plug-in meters(not the £1000+ systems TPU and TH are using),were around 15W to 50W higher. So the GTX780 did not have ridiculous power consumption.
Except also PCs consume so little power(unless you going for OTT setups OFC) ,compared to other things in the house especially since my calculations overexagerate the hours of gaming involved,and the fact the measurements are done using games like Crysis3 - many games which involve 100s of hours of gameplay are far more CPU limited rather than GPU heavy. Games like Crysis3 or even BF4 SP are lucky to see even 40 hours in total. They are all short SP games,which are used as "worse case" scenarios. No different from CPU reviews which do the same,unless you think Prime95 or 3D rendering 24/7 is what people generally do with their systems.
How many reviews test WoW power consumption or D3 or any of the games which people will spend 100s of hours playing??
Most of the the test systems websites use also have motherboards geared towards overclocking and very large PSUs geared towards power delivery for the high end cards used,so are probably not that efficient either(some might be),and these influence the wall power draw figures.
Plus looking at forums people hardly seem to keep graphics cards for three years it appears - seen plenty of people going from HD7970/GTX680/HD7950/GTX670 cards within two years on multiple ones worldwide.
On top of this a PC is not only a GPU or CPU - its the rest of it. You might not realise I have only used SFF PCs as my primary ones since late 2005 - things like motherboards,PSUs and even monitors are usually ignored by people and these can add many watts to the full system power consumption. The same goes with overclocking and not undervolting when relevant.
Plus again usage habits,usage habits,usage habits - things like desktops cannot compete for effiency compared to something like a laptop or tablet.
Better to browse the internet and do word processing on one of those than using your desktop with its large monitor. Many laptops are lucky to see 60W full load at the wall including the monitor,and ARM/Atom/Jaguar based netbooks are lucky to see even half of that and at least most people I know have a tablet or laptop lying around.
The most efficient desktop is one which is switched off.
Plus OFC as others have told you on several occasions the extra heat will actually keep the ambient temperature of the room higher even if it is kept on.
For example my mate who runs bioinformatics stuff on his PC -literally runs jobs for months at a time where his system is on 24/7 at heavy load and he is using a Phenom II X6 and an HD7870 and a 24/7 server/storage box based on some old Core2 box and an HD4670 which is used to backup the final data sets produced(gigabytes of data). So none of his computers are that efficient at all and they are under heavy load. So he was seeing £35/month in total bills AT WORSE during winter.
His flat rarely needs any heating and his bills are small - his flat is all electric with no gas and he lives in a place where the tariffs are higher than average. So that means the hobs,fridge,microwav,water heater and shower are all electric and since he rents he cannot change any of it - most of it is years old. There are more efficient alternatives available now.
But his flat is very well insulated and has decent windows,and the following point what peterb made I agree with:
During summer he just opens the windows,and is perfectly fine.However it does perhaps illustrate that the best investment in energy saving measures is improved house insulation, cavity wall, triple glazing, loft and underfloor insulation.
So I will need to agree to disagree as I said before as we appear to be diametrically opposed in many ways regarding our viewpoints.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 22-10-2014 at 11:11 AM.
Had to submit a meter reading yesterday, and had a poke around my account details on the website.
It says I pay 4p/kWh for gas and 11.5p/KWh for electricity. Makes me wonder if I can run my own generator off a gas turbine, if it is only 50% efficient my electricity would still be way cheaper.
Just need some car manufacturer to make these things mass produced so I can go down the scrappy and get myself a power plant. http://www.bladonjets.com/applicatio...pt-case-study/
If I could run the exhaust through a radiator I could have my own CHP system
CAT-THE-FIFTH (22-10-2014)
http://www.baxi.co.uk/renewables/com...wer/ecogen.htm
Not sure of the true economics of such a device, I just remember seeing it a while back.
Though you'd be very hard pressed to approach 50% electrical efficiency from a gas turbine, unless of course you were also making use of the exhaust heat.
CAT-THE-FIFTH (22-10-2014),DanceswithUnix (22-10-2014)
Gah, beat me to it, I was about to post that exact link
Micro-CHP never really took off, but then again the micro systems use the waste heat from domestic heating & hot water to generate the electricity, rather than using the waste heat from electricity generation to provide domestic heating & hot water. I suspect some work could be done on the relative efficiency of the two systems. Where a micro-CHP really wins is that the time you're generating most electricity is the time when you're most likely to use it: winter evenings when it's dark outside. You have the heating on to keep the house warm and that generates the electricity for your lighting and entertainment (and a 1kw system will light a house and run your TV/Computer/Stereo etc).
All that said, a 70kW micro gas turbine that fits in a car? Yeah, that'll power most houses without batting an eyelid. Question is how much gas it burns to do it
CAT-THE-FIFTH (22-10-2014)
Nice idea, but I'm quite shocked that it eligible for the feed in tarriff.
Why? You're generating electricity from heat that would otherwise be wasted by venting it out of boiler flue. It doesn't (AFAIK) use any additional gas to generate that energy, so you're reducing CO2 emmisions.
That looks very interesting!
My boiler is rather old and probably won't last many years, so I will have some upfront costs coming my way anyway.
The family have baths. Lots of them, far more than my blokeish head can fathom. If heating the bathwater produces electricity as a side effect, then that is probably quite a lot of power.
Looking around it seems that the boiler is expected to be installed downstairs, and my current unit is free-standing in a cupboard so possibly a non starter (for now, technology should improve).
@scaryjim: Not quite true; modern condensing boilers are extremely thermally efficient, with claims of up to 98%.
You're not getting anything for free, it's still a generator, turning some energy from the gas into electricity and I also don't really understand why such a thing is eligible for the FIT. Then again the whole FIT program never did make a great deal of sense to start with...
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