Real world power consumption.

I've just picked up a cheap plug-in power meter (on special for £6.99 at Aldi this week) and can now see that my particular setup is pulling an average of 305W out of the wall socket when the PC is in a fairly idle state. By inputting your cost/kilowatt hour, the meter calculates your running costs at any one particular socket (all your kit is plugged into a single socket via a surge protected extension strip,right?)

I'm on the Click Energy 3 tariff with British Gas which means my Tier 2 electricity costs 8.706p per Kwh so I guess an hour of joy on my PC sets me back 2.66p. Not a bad price to pay for entertainment these days. Yes, I can do deluded so well. The credit card bill for the My System spendfest at Scan hasn't hit the doormat yet. And then I also splurged on a YSP-1100 Yamaha Sound Projector in a separate moment of madness. Oh the pain!

the PC in the sig? including monitor? 305W is very good isnt it? :s

Yes, 305W is for the PC specced in My System including the Dell 30". I also have a PCI-e TV card with dual Freeview tuners on board. When the monitor goes into Standby the power drawn from the wall drops to 185W. It drops a further 7W if I switch the Sound Projector off. I'm doubly lucky in that the Asus mobo and Dell combination appears to support Vista's allegedly flaky S3 sleep mode where only 1.8W is consumed to keep the RAM alive.

What happens to the power if you start pushing it instead of sitting there idle?