Power consumption

[Olle P]

I don't find 200W average power consumption while gaming to be anything but expected.

It would be a lot nicer to see a graphical representation of the power consumption over time, with scaling down to at least per 10ms. ... or at least get the peak value as well.

I suspect the power consumption peaks at power on (to spin up the HDDs) and then occasionally during gaming when both the CPU and GPU work at their peak load.

/Olle

[Papercut]

Originally Posted by Olle P

It would be a lot nicer to see a graphical representation of the power consumption over time, with scaling down to at least per 10ms. ... or at least get the peak value as well.

Was that directed at me, specifically?

Anyway, the reading when powering up was around 0.6x..I would imagine that hard drive power consumption is not that much, compared to modern CPUs and GPUs. Perhaps it would be a different situation if we were talking about a server with many hard drives, but that's not the case here...

[fguerro]

Originally Posted by Papercut

So I discovered that my dad has one of those clamp meters that can measure AC current draw. Multiply that by the AC voltage value (~240V here) and voila, you get the number of watts drawn by your power supply

Current draw when idle:
0.46-0.50A

D2OL (CPU 100% load):
~0.63A

Gaming:
0.82-0.83A

So the PSU draws around 200W when gaming, give or take. At 80% efficiency, this would mean about 160W of power going to the actual components.

I also wanted to test something else - whether CPU clock speed scaling affects the amount of power it draws when the Vcore remains unchanged. So I downclocked my CPU to 207x10MHz (to maintain the same RAM speed) at the same voltage and got the following reading when running D2OL:
0.54-0.57A
Quite a big difference; I didn't really expect that.

Hope you guys found this interesting

Yeah it would be nice to have a little 'booger' like that to use on my system to measure current. It may scare me to know the amount of real *juice* it's actually using

[Olle P]

Originally Posted by Papercut

Was that directed at me, specifically?

Sort of, but also made as a general comment.
It's always good to know the peak consumption if/when tight fusing on the supply line comes into play. Like on the LAN party where every eight users had to share 10A (~275W each).

Anyway, the reading when powering up was around 0.6x..I would imagine that hard drive power consumption is not that much, compared to modern CPUs and GPUs. Perhaps it would be a different situation if we were talking about a server with many hard drives, but that's not the case here...

I suppose you're right. I made that remark based on my own experience with my first computer that an IBM 486SL2/66 CPU and some Trident graphics card. When I added a second harddrive the 50W PSU wasn't enough to spin up both drives at once.

/Olle

[Papercut]

Well in regards to the first point, I'm working with an A$65 (~$50 USD, for reference) piece of equipment that has ±2% accuracy, so this was never meant to be a comprehensive "scientific" test; it's just to satisfy a bit of curiosity

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Papercut

Well in regards to the first point, I'm working with an A$65 (~$50 USD, for reference) piece of equipment that has ±2% accuracy, so this was never meant to be a comprehensive "scientific" test; it's just to satisfy a bit of curiosity

TBH, that's really good enough. There's no real need for you to know the actual power consumption up to the closest 0.001W.