On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 9:36 AM, James <wirel...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote: > <SNIP> >> >> Amp meters are less than $50 USD. They clamp around the >> power cord, or any wires inside the computer you can fit >> the "clamp" around. > > <SNIP> >> >> hth, >> James >> >> > I haven't read this thread but I do use one of these which costs less than > $20: > > http://www.amazon.com/P3-International-P4400-Electricity-Monitor/dp/B00009MDBU/ref=pd_sim_hi_1 > > Personally I think CPU power consumption is a red herring without > including the power consumed by the rest of the box: > > MB power? > Hard drive power? > Hard disk power > GPU power? > DRAM power? > > The 5 above can easily become the dominant power hogs. > > I use an Intel i7 980X 6-core hyper-threaded CPU, so that's 12 CPUs in > top, which burns _lots_ of power, but I suspect it's not the biggest > power consumer when compared to the total of the 6 500GB 7200 RPM hard > drives I have in the box.
Spinning disks consume surprisingly little power once they're up to speed. My GPU, by comparison, doesn't seem to reduce heat generation very much when relatively idle. > > WRT to money spent to run a machine I hope someone stated earlier than > this that it's the whole system that matters and not just the CPU. I didn't state so explicitly, no, but I believe I mentioned the two machines had been otherwise comparable in their equipment loadout. If I missed that, my bad. -- :wq
