Anyone know how much it costs them to run their XXX Watt power supply and PC for X amount of time, how much it would cost you per hour or per month? For example, if you had a home server with a 500W power supply and ran it 24/7 at half load, how much would it increase your power bill?
I am curious how much keeping a home server on 24/7 is worth it over keeping it on only when I am at home. I thought someone said keeping a 360 or PS3 on 24/7 is only a few bucks a month.
Word. 10% load = $6.12/mo. :shrug: That actually seems more reasonable since my electric bill for the whole house, including an electric oven, fridge, PC, and dehumidifer running 24/7 (except the oven, duh) is only like $90 IIRC.
I have 2 desktops at home that are always on but have the HDs off/and do low power “sleep” or whatever it is…turning them off during that day didn’t yield much of a change in my power bill.
Get a watts up meter or a kill a watt and measure what your computer draws.
Ill assume youre running a Core 2 Duo around 3Ghz, and a older video card, say a 8800GT. If you have C1E and everything stock on, it would draw about 75-90 watts on idle with a fairly efficient PSU. Most power supplies are more efficient around 1/2 load, but efficiency data is out there for any quality PSU at different loads, of which its likely yours is not.
Even if youre running say a i7 at 4Ghz and two 4870X2’s, it only takes about 400 watts off the wall at idle. Thats a whole lot, yes, but nobody here has anywhere near that kind of a rig.
Where the real power consumption comes into play is the video cards. The CPU takes less power than you would assume. A single 4870 takes about 80 watts at IDLE. Its doing nothing, and drawing as much as your light. If you load the GPU, a 4870 can take over spec at around 200W. Once you start doing some radical overlocks on a quad core processor and turn all the power saving features off to try and get a higher overclock, then your CPU starts taking some serious power. But out of the box, a quad takes 40 watts or less at idle. Plus your average PSU is only 75-80% efficient at lower loads.
lol, I remember when 8800GTX came out, people figured out the cost of running them in SLI @ 8 hours a day (since each one consumes 300-350W under load).
If you’re wondering about wattage amounts, just go to newegg.com to figure it out.
Generally yeah… 20-40watts at idle, 65-120w under full load. (mine is 90W)