How much juice does it use?

[Webby]

Well since the have been other threads about how much folding costs, and since I just plugged in a power meter I now know how much power my system uses when idle and when folding.

My Power meter records "at the wall" load so it will be actual power being consumed not the power required to run the system, as power supply efficiency is not taken into account.

The system that these values all apply to is the following.

CPU: C2D E6550 OC to 2.8GHz at stock voltages.
Memory: 2GB Corsair XMS2 PC2 6400 CL4, running at 800MHz DDR timings of 4-4-4-12 at 2.1v
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R, Stock voltages.
Graphics Card: Gecube 3870 X-Turbo III
Hard Drives: 2x 250GB Weston Digital Caviar SATA II
Optical Drives: Optiarc DVD Writer
Cooling: Scythe Kama fan controller, 2x 120mm Akasa Amber case fans and 1x 92mm Akasa Amber fan on CPU.

Right so some figures.

When idle 102W
When folding 139W

I leave it to other people to calculate how much folding costs, obviously if you run F@H when surfing etc its probably isn't costing that much only an additional 37W now if you leave the PC on all night to fold then it costs you the full 139W all night. Obviously the flip side of the power usage is that you generate heat which at this time of year helps cut down your heating bill

[Zak33]

well done chap...saw your post in the other thread, hoped you come over here with it

[schmunk]

What this also highlights is the questionable real need for 500W+ PSUs for the average PC...

(yes, I realise that his l33t GrafX cartouche is not being stressed in the above situations, but even so, 139W...)

[Zak33]

Schmunk...you're right. A GOOD QUALITY psu of 350 waats is good enough.

I have a Quad at 2.7, a Raptor, a WD 400 Gig AAKS, a Deathstar (in a caddy), a SATA optical, an X1900 XT with 512 DDR3 and it's ALL on a Silverstone 350W.

[Fraz]

When idle 102W which converts to 0.15kWh
When folding 139W which converts to 0.21kWh

How are you doing this conversion? It doesn't make any sense to me. One has basic units of joules/second, and the other has basic units of joules.

[Webby]

And you have to remember that thats 140W at the wall so after the PSU has converted 15% of it to heat my PSU is only supplying ~118W, what is that about 23% of my total 520W Now I would guess that when gaming it is going to draw an additional 75W (pure speculation ) which will put me at about 193W (37% of max PSU load) this is a bit low for ideal efficiency, Corsair's website says their PSUs are most efficient at ~50% load.

From this I guess I could have got away with a smaller PSU but since I wanted modular and potential for expansion (and I got it cheap £45 ).

Maybe I will go quad core after I have paid for my holiday this would push me up another 40W which moves me closer to that ideal of 50% load.

[Webby]

How are you doing this conversion? It doesn't make any sense to me.

I wasn't, it is one of the options to display in that format instead of Watts.

I will have a check but remember that a Watt is Joules per second and a kWh is 3,600,000 Joules.

Edit: Checked the manual its not a direct conversion it was counting how many kWh it is using so today it says 3.3kWh. So just ignore those figures.

[Fraz]

I wasn't, it is one of the options to display in that format instead of Watts.

I will have a check but remember that a Watt is Joules per second and a kWh is 3,600,000 Joules.

Yes - one is power, and one is energy. The kWh display just tells you how much total energy you've used through the meter at that point. It will always go up with time.

If your machine runs at 139 Watts for 24 hours, the kWh display will read 0.139 * 24 = 3.34 kWh for a day of folding.

[Webby]

Edited first post to remove the figures