[ale] Electric bill

[Pat Regan]

On Sat, 4 Jun 2011 12:30:32 -0400
David Hillman <hillmands at gmail.com> wrote:

> more stuff than I need. Supermicro has a couple of dual Atom Mini-ITX
> server boards, but they are pretty expensive.  You get what you pay
> for with those boards, though.

I picked up a P3 Kill-A-Watt a couple of months ago and I had some fun
measuring various devices around the house.

The thing I was most curious about was my home file server (aka my
arcade cabinet).  It sits right behind me and the cpu and ps fans are
fairly noisy (the guts I reused are getting pretty old), so I don't
leave it powered up all the time.

I was hoping that one of those nvidia ion motherboards (with the atom
cpus) would be fast enough for the games I have on there.  I was also
hoping that the power savings would be great enough to help offset the
cost of the "upgrade."

The cabinet currently has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800, five 1 TB drives
(that are almost always spun down), and a very outdated nvidia card of
some sort.

When playing games it maxes out at about 135 watts.  When all the
drives are spun down and it is idling it uses a bit over 100 watts.
That's less than $100 per year, assuming I run it 24/7 (which I'm
not).  If the replacement hardware magically used no power it would
take more than 2 years to pay for the "upgrade."

I keep putting upgrade in quotes because the newer, lower powered
hardware isn't faster than what I already have.  :)

The internet leads me to believe that the best I can hope for is around
20-30 watts at idle.

Pat