{"id":1094,"date":"2012-10-16T13:24:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-16T12:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/?p=1094"},"modified":"2012-11-21T22:43:50","modified_gmt":"2012-11-21T22:43:50","slug":"how-much-power-does-a-pc-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/?p=1094","title":{"rendered":"How much power does a PC use?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Before I go much further into this article I will say &#8211; there is <strong>no one answer to how much power does a PC consume<\/strong>. You have to <strong>take into consideration<\/strong> the <strong>internal components<\/strong> (particularly the CPU and if the PC uses a HDD or SSD), the<strong> age of the PC<\/strong>, the <strong>efficacy of its PSU<\/strong> and also <strong>how far its components are pushed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The simplest way to determine how much power your PC uses is to <strong>buy yourself a relatively cheap power meter<\/strong> like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/gp\/product\/B003ELLGDC\/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00\">this one on Amazon<\/a> which I got for a <strong>little under \u00a310<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>All the same the video below shows a selection of the various types of PCs I have to hand and how much they consume, a further write up is over the page.<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JE5NDx780QA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h5>10zig Thin Client<\/h5>\n<p>Thin clients are low powered devices that are in truth little more than a monitor connection and a PC that serves one task &#8211; to provide a method of accessing remote computing resources (be it a Citrix or Remote Desktop Services Farm).<\/p>\n<p>To perform this task thin clients need very little processing power (in these thin clients its just a little Atom CPU) and also use Flash memory to help keep the power consumption as low as possible. The case of the thin client also acts as a heat sink and so does not need a fan to keep it cool.<\/p>\n<p>As you might expect the thin client is the best performer in this quick test with a <strong>idle power of about 12-13W<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<h5>Novatech nBox\u00a0E350<\/h5>\n<p>This small form factor PC uses\u00a0the highly efficient <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amd.com\/uk\/products\/desktop\/apu\/mainstream\/Pages\/mainstream.aspx#1\">AMD E-350 APU<\/a> (which combines a CPU and\u00a0a GPU onto a single chip and is AMDs direct competitor to the Intel Atom line up), the PC also has a SSD inside and is so low power it uses a notebook PC style lead to provide power from the wall socket. As the processor runs so cool the internal fan rarely needs to come on saving even more power.<\/p>\n<p><strong>At idle the PC uses a between 16-20W<\/strong> although you would expect the power consumption to rise as the PCs CPU gets put to work.<\/p>\n<h5>Intel Atom Desktop PC<\/h5>\n<p>This older model\u00a0PC uses a Intel Atom processor but has a hard disk drive instead of a SSD inside, hard drives are a moving component and so require power to spin the drive around adding to the PCs overall power consumption. This model of PC also has a fan in the PSU and also on the CPU adding to the moving parts and power consumption.<\/p>\n<p><strong>At idle the PC uses around 44W<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<h5>Stone Age Pentium 4 PC<\/h5>\n<p>Back from the stone age this Pentium 4 CPU powered PC is a true hog &#8211; the Pentium\u00a04s were rated all the way up to 110W \u00a0max power consumption and\u00a0that is\u00a0not including the 3 fans inside the PC and the old hard drive.<\/p>\n<p>As you might expect this PC has a quiet excessive power consumption at <strong>108W when idle<\/strong> (and that&#8217;s\u00a0without Windows booted).<\/p>\n<p>At the moment we are using some of these older PCs as fat\/thin clients\u00a0however as you might expect I am quiet eager to get them replaced with the true thin clients that consume up to 8.5X less power.<\/p>\n<h5>6 Core Media Suite PC<\/h5>\n<p>With a 6 core CPU, dedicated AMD graphics card and LOTS of fans you might expect this PC to consume lots of power with its only redeeming feature being the SSD.<\/p>\n<p>However I was quiet pleasantly surprised to see a power consumption of just <strong>60W when idle<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>These maybe the most high performance PCs we have however you have to consider that the AMD FX series has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amd.com\/uk\/products\/desktop\/processors\/amdfx\/Pages\/amdfx-key-architectural-features.aspx\">lot of power management tools<\/a> built in including the ability to turn off unused processor cores &#8211; this leads to a highly efficient machine in the long run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before I go much further into this article I will say &#8211; there is no one answer to how much power does a PC consume. You have to take into consideration the internal components (particularly the CPU and if the PC uses a HDD or SSD), the age of the PC, the efficacy of its PSU and also how far&#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/?p=1094\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[62,12,150,149,63],"series":[],"class_list":["post-1094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware","tag-10zig","tag-amd","tag-intel","tag-power","tag-thin-client"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1094"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1196,"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094\/revisions\/1196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1094"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=1094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}