Electrical Costs: the Full Capacity for 24-Hour System
We calculated the electrical costs for a computer running at full capacity for 24 hours. There aren’t a lot of users that use their computers in this manner, but it is still very interesting to look at. An example of this type of usage is distributed computing like Seti@home, or a never-ending conversion of videos for the Web.
The costs change during constant loading of a system: the Phenom does better than the Athlon 64 X2 6400+, and is about $5.39 (3.50 Euros) cheaper per year. To put this in perspective, the Phenom has four cores and the Athlon 64 X2 has two; the Phenom is, in addition to having a lower clock rate, more efficient. And it can be said that the Phenom also performs well on a heavily-burdened server; you get more computing power for less electrical power.
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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?