On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 11:55 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <[email protected]> wrote: > On 30/07/12 06:08, Michael Mol wrote: >> >> On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 10:50 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >>> On 30/07/12 05:23, Philip Webb wrote: >>>> >>>> i5-2550K & FX-4100 both use 95 W >>>> (some of the more costly AMDs use 125 W ). >>> >>> >>> >>> Note that power savings are not important if you're not using a laptop. >>> CPU >>> power savings on a desktop don't translate to any relevant amount of >>> money >>> on your electricity bills. This is because neither of those CPUs really >>> use >>> 95W. That's just the thermal upper limit. >> >> >> To be fair, power savings are relevant if you're concerned about your >> electric bill, or if you're concerned about heat management in your >> system. >> >> Consider my dual E5345...leaving that on 24x7 appears to cost me about >> 90USD/mo. > > > CPU power savings will transform that into a 89.9USD/mo ;-) That's what I > mean. It's not worth much. It helps quite a bit with laptop battery life. > But for desktops, it doesn't do anything too useful.
If you really want the hard numbers, check out some place like Tom's Hardware or Phoronix. I forget which does the power consumption measurements. At some of the hardware review blogs, you can get numbers on idle vs full-load power consumption, as measured at the wall. The difference truly is striking. Now, at least part of the problem with my E5345 setup is that I'm running two high-performance Xeon processors that only have operational clock speeds: 2.33 GHz and 2.00GHz. Desktop-targeted CPUs often will clock down to just a hair over 1GHz, if not a hair under, if you have proper power management daemons running. -- :wq
