Energy Consumption: Burdening the Complete System to the Maximum
by
Bert Toepelt
The energy consumption of the complete system is not good when the energy hungry CPUs are loaded to the limit. The energy saving Sempron 64 3000+ needs, under full system load, 97.0 watts, 70.1 W of which fall away through the system.
The hungriest processor, the Athlon 64 X2 6400+, needs 177.3 W, while 73.9 W are due to the system. In total, it needs about 3.8 W more.
The Phenom slides into second last place when fully loaded. When processors alone were being tested to full capacity the Phenom 9600 did better, at 8.07 watts behind the Athlon 64 X2 6400+. When the complete system is measured, the gap is reduced to 2.11 W.
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my media centre based on a 3700+ (S939, single core san diego, 1MB, 2.2GHz) only uses 56-58W while running rosetta@home! That's including 1.25GB DDR (3 sticks), a freeview TV tuner, and a 2GB compactflash card on a Seasonic S12 330W PSU. It's undervolted as far as it'd go though...
What about performance per watt comparisons, which would have been the best comparison you could have made in such an article.
If you had a system that consumed 300W of power (forget about idle and full load differences for this question!!) with a 500W PSU, what would your power consumption be for the purpose of energy bill calculation?
Am I correct in believing that the rating of your PSU is the maximum power it can supply, and that it only actually draws what the system asks for? So in this case, your overall system power use would be 300W?
So, if you install a much more powerful PSU than you currently need (for the sake of future SLI upgrades) you wouldn't be wasting electricity?