Power consumption

[Obsidian]

Hi there

I've got my GB-PVR box working pretty much as I'd like now, and I've got onto considering power consumption. Obviously this concerns me for two reasons - environmental worries, and the costs to myself. My box sits in my living room, and is currently on 24/7. The problem I have is that the machine hosts EWA, and I would like to (eventually) use it as a general purpose web/file server. As I understand it, this probably means that I won't be able to use standby. I have set the hard drives to power down after ten minutes of activity, and I always turn the TV off completely when I am not using it. Does anyone have any idea what sort of power consumption a system such as this (see my sig) would use when idle? I am guessing it must be around 100w or so?

I was wondering what tips other people could give me to reduce the power consumption of the machine. Am I wrong about there being a way of using standby for my purposes? Are there other ways of reducing the power consumption of the machine when idle? What general tips can people offer?

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions offered

[Ted the Penguin]

get a kill-a-watt, or comparable power meter, it is really useful to determine how much power things require. or if you have a UPS (and you should have one on a 24/7 machine BTW) some tell you how much power the machine is using, I know the one I have at work does.

[gEd]

here are a few apps that will estimate how much power your system will use


http://www.journeysystems.com/?powercalc
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp
http://files.pcapex.com/details.php?file=19

the only thing that I can think of to reduce your consumption would be to underclock/undervolt the cpu if your motherboard supports this. However as you are at 1.6Ghz, you wouldn't want to go down to low.

You could write a script that puts the pc into standby and schedule this to run (using windows scheduler) when everyone has gone to bed. Then use gbpve to wake pc up in the morning to download the epg. This would mess up any recordings that were taking place at the time (of going into standby) tho.

um...can't think of anything else atm

[stustunz]

you dont say what power supply you have that is what will give you a good idea of the max power it will use
i checked mine uses 240 watts at the point of writing this while watching tv
power supply is a 500 watts
running through ups
It does add up when you look at the cost
240watts x 24hrs x 19cents/kw x28days=NZ$30.64/month holly s@#$t i never realised

[User]

I power down my 47 Watt monitor when I am not at the computer, an obvious one. I also contribute my extra CPU cycles to the Folding@home project at Stanford University, which makes me feel better about the Watts I use keeping the machine on 24/7.

[ricklous]

another option...

Mini-itx boards are designed from the get-go for low power consuption/noise. take a look at the average power usage on the table at the top of this site. one of the passively-cooled boards with a laptop hdd is perfectly adequate for hosting a website at home and cant be heard the majority of the time, and would alow you to use standby/hibernate on the more power hungry PVR PC. to access EWA, you'd need to go to device manager on the GBPVR machine, and set the NIC to wake the pc up on all events, and on your web machine, just link back to the GBPVR machine. when you hit the link it would wake up the GBPVR machine, and give you access to EWA.

if your PVR machine is on the majority of the time anyway, then the benefits of a lowpowered machine alongside it may well be negligeble. but i think it would be worth doing some sums on what your consumption would be in different scenarios...

[cosmocat]

The best way is as Ted the Penguin said with a power meter, but a good estimate is to take the Thermal Design Power (TDP) of your processor and add another 50%.
For my 2.5G Celeron thats 85Watts + 50% = 127Watts.

I was suprised to find that the Core2Duo processors use LESS power than old celerons. A 2.6GHz P4 Core2Duo has a TDP of 65Watts, so about 97Watts for the box, and twice the processing power.

Hhhmmm... maybe I should upgrade.

[dragonfiregum]

This is one of the reasons i made my computer PVR/personal use computer. No use having 2 . I find that it eats about 250W's or so on the Meter which i have in the front of the case.
And i leave it on all the time.. fully lit up with dozens of LED lights and about 12 fans..

[elite]

Can we delete this thread? - Don't want Mrs Elite to see it:eek:

Unless, maybe a good plan to fund an upgrade... WOL, mini-itx...

[Obsidian]

Thanks for all the comments everyone. I found quite a good article on this, which suggests that I could use S3 standby and wake on lan to produce a machine which is always available, but will shut down to a mode using virtually no power whenever it's not in use. Sounds too good to be true! I've not got this to work yet, but here's the link:

http://www.exoid.com/?page_id=47