LOL! No we won't! We are on teh interwebs and everything is clicketyclick. Waiting is for l00sers! Oh and perhaps you guys should just get a maplin watt-meter if you're still waiting for the euro-killawatt?
Wow... I don't have enough superlatives to describe the ridiculousness of that. That is one fugly huge piece of.... And they call it "The ideal home entertainment center" LOL that's gotta be for people who want an entertainment center the size of a small fridge hovering in their living room.
i actually lolled when i saw the two kids sitting there both playing their own video game... as if it would not be WWIII in the living room for who gets to play on the big screen.
Had it been sexier (and may be a bit smaller), it could actually have been ideal for many people who have one main desktop + one file server. But as it stands, its only usefulness is to amuse people in thread like this. Slightly off topic, but there are actually rack-mount cases that can house multiple ITX systems (no, not blade servers). Now they would be quite useful.
Just built up my new rig which im planning on turning off at night from now on. I took a step back in time to account for my torrents though. I got a p3 1 ghz machine 1 bg of ram in a 1U chassis. Unfortunately i dont have the cash to blow on uppgrading the 6 250gb HDDs yet but it should make for a great 24/7 torrent/file server. The only thing installed on it is utorrent and virus scan. No bells, no whistles, no monitor. Cost about $50 and should run around 60 watts with all of the harddrives on.
http://www.theowl.com/buy.php £35. A sensor clips on your main-line and record total energy usage. Good to get am overall view of how much juice you're using in the whole house.
Ok this thread is too long to read so forgive me I'm reposting anything. A PC will use however much power it needs. Just like having a kettle, if it's not boiling water it's not going to draw 3KW, if your PC is idling it's not going to be sucking 1000W out the wall. PSUs are rated according to wattage because a) it's a simply measure of what it can cope with b) it's much easier for companies to market them that way. Most SLI set ups don't use more than 400w even at load, for the record (my friend tested this by loading up his PC in some benchmarking suite and putting one of those special plugs in the wall that measures wattage). You want to get an efficiently performing PSU, because the nature of a PSU is to convert 230v power at the wall into 12v / 5v etc inside your computer. Doing this conversion creates heat, which needs to be cooled with a fan, and also leaks some power into the air I guess, I'm no electronics guru (though know some..). So it's technically impossible for a PSU to be 100% efficient, that would mean 100% of watts going in, go to components. So say your components need 300w running, and you have a 50% efficient PSU. That means you're going to be sucking 600w out of the wall, because 300w are being converted into heat in the conversion process. Generally, this is what you get with cheaper PSUs. More heat is also bad in a system for obvious reasons. The big PSU manufacturers came up with 80+ as a simple guide so people would buy quality rather than quantity (i.e. 'moar watts')). Here's an extremely useful link if you're looking at the power consumption of graphics cards: http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp?s=2&c=7&t=9354 It's definitely something to keep bookmarked, the guy updates it regularly and puts a lot of effort into it. You can see even if an older card i.e. 7900gs performs as well as say an 8600, that the 7900 is going to be using more watts, and watts directly create heat in your system.
we are no fools here, but this is only a 2 page thread, and it's easily read within 10mins. try flicking through a "official" thread on other forums, searching for a single post within 100 pages. as you've said there, PC will only use whatever is needed, and the efficiency rating is there for guidance. this is exactly the reason when people try to be efficient, they buy the highest possible efficiency rated PSU, as that's where most of the power are lost. sure PC uses whatever power it needs, but why buy 8800GTX where it idles at 70w (according to your graph) when you can buy 8800GTS, similar performance at lower resolution, yet get only 50w idle? this is the reason for this small thread. [thanks for the link, bookmarked] but one thing is for sure, electric power don't leak into air, lol. technically is impossible during the AC/DC conversion, but it is perfectly possible for AC/AC conversion to be 100% efficient. the thing here is because of the ripple created during the conversion, to maintain a perfectly steady 12v will require a LOT of analogue electronics. (don't piss me off, just had a bad electromagnetism exam )
Energy efficiency and power usage is very important to me now. I started feeling extremely guilty leaving my gaming machine on just to torrent/idle in irc. So I just bought a little Atom based system for £150 ish which will do everything non-gaming/programming for about 15-20x less power use. Happy gadgety days playing with it and setting up Linux as well
I was given an old p3 dell a while ago. I stripped out the floppy and cd/dvd drive and turned off all unnecessary devices in the BIOS (parallel serial etc) and then installed linux as a server and tested the power drain. I was amazed that it only need 24W in idle. Compared to my gaming rig that pulls 150W upwards. But it'd be nice to have something even less draining.
Take a look at SilentPCReview.com. As the name suggests, their focus is on quiet computers, but since more power consumption in a computer means more heat, which requires more fans, they focus pretty closely on power consumption as well. The same people also run a site called EcoPCReview.com, but that site is much newer and much less frequently updated.
