Does anyone have any idea what kind of power an average gaming PC will use at idle? My spec is: AMD FX-8370E - Watercooled nVidia 670GTX Cheesecake - Watercooled Sabertooth Board 4 3.5" Drives 2 SSD 1 Water pump 500W PSU 3x140MM Fans 2x120MM Fans I know it can't be accurate without a tester, but just as a general thing has anyone got any idea what it should consume?
Under 100 watts. I have older cpu and 2 gpus from same architecture all under water and it's in the low 80s before monitor.
I've found that this site http://powersupplycalculator.net/ gives fairly reasonable estimates on real power use provided the components are in their list. Of course it's still not as good as using a real load meter of some kind or another.
The easiest solution would be to order a Power meter from amazon. I don't know how much your watercooling adds to the power draw.
IIRC, my rig draws around 105W at idle. Not the worst thing in the winter, but gets a tad irritating when it's >25C outside.
I get that number - with X99 DELUXE, GTX980 and including 4k 32" monitor and two 27" 2560x1440 monitors. ~150W was norm at Core 2 era with older GPU which didn't idle that well.
