Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Home PC power consumption

I'm doing some math around the power consumption advantages of thin clients, namely the Sun Ray, versus regular PCs (spell: green IT).
So I borrowed a power meter from a colleague and just checked my own PC, a fairly regular, non-game, non-graphics PC:
2 GHz Athlon, 1GB RAM, 2 HDs, Radeon 9000 on-board graphics, and the usual peripherals like Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers... nothing fancy.

Without the monitor the PC uses the following power (measured right at the power plug):
  • 0W when totally switched off at the back-side
  • 2,7W (!!!) when switched off only with the front side switch (or shut-down menu),
    as well as in hibernate mode
  • 7W (!!!) in stand-by mode
  • 115-130W when in use
I could not find a clear correlation between the power consumption and CPU or disk usage. It would just oscillate between 115 and 130W...

So - again without the Monitor - over a whole year, with my regular PC usage at home this amounts for 328kWh or about 6% of my electricity bill.