how many watts is my system using?

[JazzyJake]

hey guys
from the looks of my system specs, can you guys give a ball-park estimate on how much wattage my system is using?
my dad was wondering...
so maybe it's time for me to get worried
"YOU LEAVE IT ON ALL NIGHT TO DOWNLOAD WHAT?!?!"

[simple_inhibition]

only thing i can think of to use is a psu calculator. whats the voltage is your OC'd X2?

[JazzyJake]

i wanna say i have it at 1.375v.
i'll double check next time i reboot, (working on a paper atm)

[RangerXLT8]

Turning PCs on and off requires a moderate amount of power(think all the drives have to spin up ect). FYI there are some server RAID cards that will delay HDD startup as to not tax the PSU too much and cause failure.)

Leaving it on all the time is not going to cause a major hike in the electricity bill. Maybe 2-3 dollars a mo?

[Lokie]

I have had wattage meters hooked up to CRTs, PCs, LCDs, and water pumps. To be honest the clasic CRT takes up the most watage of them all with an avarage use of 150-240 kwh. The cycling on ond off of a PC useing more wattage is true if you do it more than once an hour. Meaning if you are away from your PC for more than an hour, turning it off saves a little money.

My system:
AMD 64 X2 3800 @ 2 GHz
DFI LANPARTY UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert
Corsair XMS4000
2 XFX 7900 GT
3 250GB Seagate’s
1 400GB Seagate
1 200GB
PCP&C Silencer 750
Lite-On Dual Layer combo drive
2 19” MAG LCD L & R
1 19” Acer LCD Center
Triplehead2go Desktop resolution 3840x1024
Microsoft Natural Ergonomic keyboard
MX 1000 Mouse
Reserator 2 water cooling

All this runs at Idle 310 kwh, if I am gaming 520 kwh. Now these are avarages with the moniters turning off after 30 minutes of idle use. Please note CRT's do take more juice. I do run my systems 24/7 with folding@home running.

Which brings me to my next point. Don't tell him your DL'n. Tell him you are folding@home for stanford university. Which for a great cause, I know HL has a team #. Once you tell your folks about folding@home I'm sure they won't mind the DL'n as much.

And as for your question of your wattage use, your PC will be lucky if it even hits 280 watts during gaming. Killo-Watt meters are cheap at Xoxide and Frozen CPU.

[wtcnbrwndo4u]

Takes more power to boot and shutdown a PC than it does to have a system in an idle state.

Either way, a quick glance of the specs comes to about 240-260W (rough estimate, it's probably even less).

[Lead Head]

Ball park? 100-140watts idle, 220-300 watts full 100% load(GPU, CPU, HD, etc..) Realistically though, its probably less then that at idle, and maby a tad lower on full load

[wtcnbrwndo4u]

Originally Posted by Lead Head

Ball park? 100-140watts idle, 220-300 watts full 100% load(GPU, CPU, HD, etc..)

Right, mine was supposed to be load BTW.

[JazzyJake]

alright.
i said i had a 550w psu, and i had no clue what it was using, and he guessed around 300w and he said that would be like $80 a month running 24/7.
i really didn't think it could be considering i've had my rig for so long.
and my laptop folds for MPC also. Gotta use school connection/power for something...

[Quakindude]

I have 2 desktop computers in the house. The first one is in my sig, then other is an AMD X2 4800, 7800GS video, 2-opticals, 1-250Gb HDD and 2 GB of ram. If I turn both of them off every night, my house electricity bill is about $23 less. If I leave them on 24/7, it's about $22 more. Where that $1 goes, I don't know, but I've throughly researched this and as long as I turn off the monitors at night, the cost remains low. All 3 of my laptops get turned off each night.

I also fold all night long, 24/7, so that accounts for a large part of that usage at night.