Test System Components
The beginning of this article will focus on introducing all of the system components, because they play an important role in energy analysis. This will also help you achieve a better understanding of the performance capabilities of a complete system.
Our complete test system platform for energy measurement.
For our energy measurements, we used the MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard, which is based on AMD’s high-end 790FX chipset. We chose the MSI board because it has a lower power draw than comparable products from Asus or Gigabyte.
Test motherboard: MSI K9A2 Platinum with the 790FX chipset.
The BIOS 1.3 equipped motherboard is used with standard settings, which means that all on-board components, like audio and serial ports, are turned on. The test system has 2 GB of DDR2 RAM memory from A-DATA. The Vitesta module is run at DDR2 800 with a timing of CL5.0.
2 GB DDR2 memory M2OMIDG314720INC5Z from A-DATA
Our cooler is the Zalman CNPS9700 LED, used with the Fanmate 2 fan controller.
The cooler is set to maximum speed during the test, which enables our instruments to produce stable measurements.
Zalman CNPS9700 LED
Our system is equipped with a system cooler for the hard drive.
The WCL-03 system cooler from Noise Zero
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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?