Power Consumption??

[shakerist]

Well I have a 620w seasonic psu M12II-620 and I was wondering does the power consumtion vary according to how much im using or is it always consuming 620w ? I looked at the bills the other day and there is a 3 kw increase on average per day when compared to last year. We have nothing new in the house apart from my new computer, I used to have a dell pentium 4 laptop so im guessing that 3kw increase is me

[mrt9888]

It will only draw as much power as the motherboard ask for, so if your components use 40w at idle then it will draw 40w minus the efficiency of the PSU. So if your PSU is 85% efficient then at most 15% of the 40w will be wasted.

[shakerist]

Is there a way to find out how much power im actually using??

[Sprite]

Is there a way to find out how much power im actually using??

http://www.maplin.co.uk/plug-in-main...-monitor-38343

You can probably get one for cheaper than £20 but this is the one I have.

[Funkstar]

PSUs inside virtually all electronics are switching PSUs, they only use the power (plus a bit more for inefficiency) they are asked to supply. Linear power supplies always suck that amount of power and dissipate the rest as heat. Linear PSUs are usually used when the electrical supply needs to be very clean. They are also used in HiFi equipment quite a lot.

mrt9888's example isn't really right. It's not "40w minus the efficiency of the PSU", it's plus a little bit. If you take the 15% loss in efficiency it turns out to be 47w the PSU would be consuming to deliver that 40w, or a 17.5% increase is power used

Handy formula this one: is(part)/of(whole) = %/100

edit also, are you sure your usage patterns are the same as last year? Are you drinking more tea/coffee than you used to? cooking more? Just a thought.

[cheekster]

Is there no free software available that can illustrate how much power your PC is using?

Cheekster.

[peterb]

AS above, a plug-in wattmeter at the mains socket - measures the power, so includes losses in the PSU. It will also give you an indication ofg the power factor (whh may or may not be of interest to you)

[Pob255]

Plug in power meter is best to measure the actual usage.

I'd also suggest checking the numbers on the bill and your old bills to you electric meter reading.

It's normal practise that if when the person who come to read the meter comes to call, if he/she gets no response/cannot read the meter then they "estimate" your usage numbers.
So it could well be a case that the old "reading" was an estimate that was too low or the new "reading" is an estimate that's too high.

[DanceswithUnix]

I see you have an AMD CPU, so some things to check:

Find a "cool & quiet" utility to show the current CPU core speed, make sure at idle they are cutting back to 800MHz. I think my Asus motherboard came with one.
Turn on cool & quiet in the BIOS.
I find that Windows sometimes requires the power profile to be set to laptop before the CPU cores will power save correctly.
If you haven't installed the AMD cpu driver for Windows, it might be worth installing that.

As a crude check, if the machine is blowing like a hair drier at idle then it is probably using more power than it needs to

[phill8800GT]

Well I have a 620w seasonic psu M12II-620 and I was wondering does the power consumtion vary according to how much im using or is it always consuming 620w ? I looked at the bills the other day and there is a 3 kw increase on average per day when compared to last year. We have nothing new in the house apart from my new computer, I used to have a dell pentium 4 laptop so im guessing that 3kw increase is me

I've done a little bit of testing with power consumption from charging my phone, to using my monitor, speakers and even my PC's.
What I've found was, that my phone was using 7w whilst it was charging, my speaker setup was using 44w (Z-5500's), monitor was using about 110w (Dell 3008WFP) and my PC that I use everyday is using between 85w to 150w at the most depending on what I'm doing with it. What I find weird is that I'm currently using my Corsair AX1200 PSU with it and I know its complete overkill, but I thought it would use a bit more than that...
I did test the laptop I used to have (I gave that to a friend) but that used to use 35w whilst plugged into the wall..

When I get my i7's up and running with whatever GPU configuration I hope to end with, I'll post up some results

[oolon]

My core i7 (6 core 3.06ghz) with an ATI 6970 takes 150w to stand still, 300w in games, don't forget the monitor my 24" 1920x1280 display takes 50w. My laptop takes 60w, however it has less disk, less memory, worse graphics, only 2 cores and a smaller display, so its not a supprise.

Power is why some of us are looking at low power computing for devices we want to keep aways on as the price of the device is nothing comparied to the electricity it uses.

[phill8800GT]

Thats a very low consumption for all the hardware. I'm impressed!

How many hard drives/fans etc are installed in the system, as I guess this also might have some variation on what it does use?

[oolon]

Intel SSD, two 10k SAS 32g drives, and a 2TB green. Fans, 1 front, 1 back, 1 top, all slowed to be quite (though that does not reduce power use). Stock coolers on graphics and CPU. I think its a single fan in the PSU.

My always on takes 50w and my firewall 13w so my main box is a bit of a monster! Better than my old server a DL385 that took 300w and sounded like an plane taking off, and my san which takes 360w ... can't really justify running those much.

[phill8800GT]

I dont even want to think about what my i7 rigs will use when they are completed but I tend to just enjoy using them I do find it funny when my monitors take more power than my PC does

[oolon]

I dont even want to think about what my i7 rigs will use when they are completed but I tend to just enjoy using them I do find it funny when my monitors take more power than my PC does

My 24 port gigabit switch takes 40W

[phill8800GT]

I have no idea how much my 16 port switch takes or my router, I'd hate to think!! Its been left on now for about 4 months since I've moved in!!

What shocks everyone tho, is my £20 a month Electric bill